Maine’s trees can be used to make much more than paper, a fact that offers a potentially bright future for Maine’s forest products industry if the right pieces fall into place.

That was the message Tuesday morning at an event in Portland hosted by E2Tech, an organization that supports Maine’s environmental, energy and clean technology sectors.

The event also served as an introduction to Biobased Maine, a reimagined organization supporting efforts to encourage research and development in new technologies that enable manufacturers to turn Maine’s most abundant natural resource – trees – into biobased fuels, chemicals and advanced materials. The organization was formerly known as the Sustainable Bioplastics Council of Maine, but the name was changed in January to reflect much wider potential beyond just bioplastics, according to Charlotte Mace, who was hired last September to reboot the organization. She is the organization’s first full-time executive director.

Developing technologies can extract high-value biobased chemicals, fuels and materials from wood pulp, which can then be used in clothing, coatings, adhesives, industrial chemicals and structural components, according to Mace.

“There are a lot of everyday products that involve biobased materials,” Mace said. “Virtually anything we make out of crude oil and natural gas can be made out of plants.”

Biobased Maine says global demand for biofuels is projected to increase from $82.7 billion in 2011 to $185.3 billion by 2021. The biobased product markets are already significant in the United States – representing more than 2.2 percent of gross domestic product, or more than $353 billion in economic activity in 2012, according to a recent report from the National Research Council.

Cellulose, one of the core materials extracted from wood pulp, is “the oil of Maine,” said Tony Jabar, CEO of Cerealus, a Waterville-based company that is developing new products and processes for the forest products industry. Maine has 17 million acres of forests.

“We have a natural resource here that we can, with innovation, turn into a high-value industry in the state of Maine,” Jabar said Tuesday morning.

Three factors are driving renewed interest in biobased materials, according to Mike Bilodeau, director of the University of Maine’s Process Development Center: new technologies that have lowered the cost of the manufacturing processes; novel applications for the materials; and shifting national priorities that have made available more federal funding.

Bilodeau said the research and development going on at his center will help paper mills diversify and find new products to help them remain relevant. A paper mill in Turner Falls, Massachusetts, recently began using technology developed at UMaine to make higher-quality paper, Bilodeau said.

Maine’s forest products industry has for a century been dominated by making paper, but that industry doesn’t have the economic impact it once did. Paper mills in East Millinocket and Bucksport have closed within the last year and a half, while others in Lincoln and Rumford have made layoffs.

“Over the years, investments have been made in trying to save jobs (in the paper industry) – for good reason, … but the bottom line is that market is going away and we need to find something to replace it,” Jabar said.

Mace added urgency to the issue. “We need to re-engineer our economy,” she said. “We can’t jump off the cliff still making paper or we’re going to see Maine continue to decline.”

The extraction of biobased materials from wood pulp offers the best chance to revitalize those areas of the state that historically depended on the paper industry, Mace said.

“Biobased manufacturing is the only economic development strategy that does everything we need,” Mace said. “It uses our natural resource in a sustainable way, it creates high-paying manufacturing jobs, it responds to global demand (for these biobased materials) and it reduces our reliance on volatile crude oil.”

 

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