Finnish industry burns raw materials as smoke into the air – Researcher calculated: Market value 80 million euros

The side streams of the Finnish forest industry are insufficiently utilized. Natural Resources Center specialist researcher Kyösti Ruuttunen pay attention to the use of the shell.

“In Finland, 50,000 tons of tannin would be obtained from approximately one million tons of spruce bark per year, the market value of which can be calculated as approximately 80 million euros,” writes Ruuttunen on his blog.

Tannin is just one example.

“Very few products and materials are made from bark in Finland. In practice, all bark is burned for energy, despite the fact that it is a poor fuel due to its high moisture content and chemical composition,” Ruuttunen mentions.

According to him, the bark is mechanically resistant and contains a lot of bioactive compounds that make it difficult for insects, fungi and other harmful organisms to penetrate the wood. It would be possible to use the bark as a source of valuable chemicals. The topic is discussed in Luke’s recently published vision report “Valuable Biochemicals of the future”.

Ruuttunen states that, according to the report, tannins can be isolated from the bark of the domestic spruce in an environmentally friendly way with just hot water with a yield of five percent. Hundreds of thousands of tons of tannins are mainly used for glues and leather tanning in the world every year, and the selling price of the product can be estimated at around 1,600 euros per ton.

“Suberin is obtained from the outer bark of the birch tree, which is more commonly known as birch, which is used as a water-repellent coating for packaging materials. According to Luke’s estimate, the bark by-stream generated in the industry contains a total of 48,000 tons of suberin each year,” says Ruuttunen.

Always more to burn

In addition, the compounds isolated from the bark can also be used in, among other things, antimicrobial coatings, water purification, medicines, cosmetics and foodstuffs. It would also be possible to isolate its structural components from the bark, such as hemicellulose, lignin and fibers consisting mainly of cellulose.

“It is unfortunate that this potential is not realized in the Finnish forest industry. On the contrary, according to statistics, an increasingly large part of the wood’s dry matter is burned for energy. Fortunately, the situation is better in Sweden: last summer, the local wood processing company Södra announced that it would invest in a factory that produces tannins,” Ruutunen points out.

He says that he understands that refining the bark into products requires investments, that is, money in Finnish, there are also technical, commercial and environmental challenges involved.

“But still: valuable raw material is burned in industry as smoke into the air all the time. That thought does bother me,” Ruuttunen concludes.

We are investigating in Oulu

According to the statistics service of the Finnish Natural Resources Agency, six million cubic meters of tree bark was burned for energy in 2023 in Finland.

Among other things, the refining of the bark is being studied at the University of Oulu. The Federation of North Ostrobothnia has granted EUR 1.1 million in funding to the University of Oulu’s project, which aims at the further processing of forest bioeconomy side streams into a product of higher added value.

It is possible to recover the valuable compounds before the side stream is burned for energy. This is exactly what is being developed in the further processing of forest bioeconomy side streams into higher added value products (MEBIP) project at the University of Oulu.

Possible utilization targets in the project include the cosmetics, nutritional supplements and pharmaceutical industries.