Future forest industry

Fossil fuels aren’t just used for transport and energy – they’re also used to make everyday products. As we move away from fossil fuels, where else can we find these materials? For the team at the forest research institute Scion, the answers can be found in our forests.  

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“We need to strike the word waste from our vocabulary,” says Dr Stefan Hill, the portfolio leader of high-value biorefineries at Scion. His team are responsible for figuring out what useful compounds can be extracted out of waste biomass – for example, the bark that is stripped from pine trees before they get shipped overseas as timber.  

Bark is essentially the skin of the tree, key for its protection and defence. So the team are interested to see if they can extract antimicrobial and water repellent compounds for use in health and clothing applications.  

Some of the work is at early stages, but one idea that has progressed to proof-of-concept stage is the extraction and use of vegetable tannins.  

Chemist Dr Hilary Corkran works on the tannin extraction from pine bark in the lab. Working with Callaghan Innovation to upscale their extraction process, and in partnership with the leather and shoe research association (LASRA), they’ve been able to show that these tannins can be used to create a soft, good-quality leather product. In fact, with McKinlays footwear in Dunedin, they’ve produced the only pair of New Zealand-sourced tannin leather boots. Currently all tannins used in creating leather in Aotearoa are imported and the current most common method uses the heavy metal chromium. The team hope that their work will provide a locally sourced vegetable tannin product to change this.  

Of course, biorefineries will only work if it is technically and economically feasible to extract the materials. That is where the work of Dr Marie-Joo Le Guen comes in. She collaborates with industry partners to essentially find a ‘home’ for the materials and compounds, and work on the upscaling of the extractions to make them worthwhile.    

This year Scion is celebrating 75 years of forest science research, tracing their history back to the early days of the New Zealand Forest Research Institute in 1947 at Whakarewarewa in Rotorua on the rohe of Ngā Hapū e Toru – Ngāti Hurungaterangi, Ngāti te Taeotu and Ngāti te Kahu. Scion and Ngā Hapū e Toru recently signed a kawenata (memorandum of understanding) to work on mutually beneficially goals. Scion are also hoping to strengthen relationships with hapū and iwi around the motu, to help Māori aspirations in forestry, says Shontelle Bashara, research team leader of the Te Ao Māori team.  

Looking to the future, chief executive Dr Julian Elder sees regionally located biorefineries as an exciting potential for Aotearoa, and a way to replace many of the products that we currently get from petroleum refineries. “This is a huge resource that New Zealand grows sustainably, that we’re hardly using,” he says. 

Listen to the episode to learn more about the past, present and future of Scion, and the role that biorefineries could play in a fossil-fuel-free Aotearoa.  

To learn more: 

Our Changing World has produced many stories on the research work of Scion:  

• Listen to the science of wildfires by William Ray from 2020.  

• Alison Ballance did an episode about the use of a parasitic wasp to act as a biocontrol agent against giant willow aphids.  

• There are also these episodes from 2018 on converting poo to plastic, bio-based materials for 4D printing and testing the strength of cardboard boxes.    

And Country Life visited Te Whare Nui o Tuteata after its opening in 2021.