Korean researchers have cracked one of the biggest roadblocks to putting wood-based plastic bottles on supermarket shelves, patenting a solvent that strips up to 90 per cent of the key bioplastic ingredient from timber. That is according to Korea’s National Institute of Forest Science (NIFoS), which filed the patent this month through its Forest Products Materials Research Division.
The patent covers recovery of 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (5-HMF), a plant-derived compound that can replace petroleum as the feedstock for a growing class of bioplastics. Further processed into furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA), 5-HMF serves as a building block for polyethylene furanoate (PEF), a bio-based rival to polyethylene terephthalate (PET) used in drink bottles, food packaging, and polyester textiles.
NIFoS starts with wood treated under high heat and pressure, which breaks its sugars down into a complex mixture from which the ketone-based solvent continuously strips out 5-HMF. That continuous approach replaces the stop-start batch method most labs still rely on, with the solvent itself recycled within the process to cut both cost and waste.
Lab-scale 5-HMF recovery has historically lost a significant share of the compound to breakdown in watery conditions, where it reverts to less valuable acids before it can be extracted. The NIFoS method removes the 5-HMF before that breakdown happens, which is what lifts recovery past the 90 per cent mark.
Forest Products Materials Research Division researcher Jang Su-kyung said the result rests on yield rather than novel chemistry, with the ketone route delivering extraction efficiencies the institute regards as central to scaling 5-HMF out of the laboratory.
The filing, made under NIFoS Director Kim Yong-gwan, is part of a wider programme to localise Korea’s bioplastic supply chain, with the agency beginning construction earlier this year on a dedicated wood-based biocompound production facility. That programme, run under Korea’s post-plastic industrial strategy, treats forest biomass as a domestic replacement for imported petrochemical inputs.
Global PET production runs above 30 million tonnes a year, almost all of it made from crude-oil feedstocks and priced against oil markets. Against that scale the only commercial-scale FDCA plant in the world, Dutch company Avantium’s 5 kilotonne-a-year flagship at Delfzijl, is still working through start-up issues that Avantium disclosed in January 2026 had pushed first sales to the second half of 2026 and added €7 million to capital spending.
Avantium’s YXY process converts plant sugars directly into FDCA, a different feedstock route from NIFoS’s wood-biomass extraction. The Korean patent therefore places forestry residues rather than agricultural crops at the front of the PEF supply chain, with Jang committing the institute to continued work on the “competitiveness of original technology” for wood-based bioplastics.
The NIFoS patent, filed under application number 10-2026-0040950 with the title “Furan compound recovery method and device using ketone-based solvent,” secures Korean rights over a process recovering more than 90 per cent of a compound now central to the country’s post-plastic industrial strategy — a recovery rate lab chemistry has spent the better part of a decade chasing.
