Lignin recovery for pulp mills
Lignin Corporation helps pulp mills recover the lignin they burn today and sell it as graded, high-value products. Chemical recovery upgrades and organic acids from plant sugars follow as the mill expands.
01 / The opportunity
The digester, washers and evaporators are the mill’s biggest investment. They isolate the pulp, and in doing so they have already isolated everything else.
The other half, lignin and organic acids from plant sugars, is burned in the recovery boiler, worth about $50 per tonne as fuel.
Recovered as products, the same organics are worth 15 to 20 times their fuel value.
Extractives (soap and turpentine), about 4%, are already recovered at many mills as tall oil. The organic acids are mostly isosaccharinic, acetic, formic, lactic and glycolic acids.
Sodium and sulfur, the cooking chemicals. We keep this recovery cycle intact, with enhancements.
The part most people know about. Burned for its fuel value today.
Plant sugars broken down into hydroxy acids. Their value is hidden inside the salts, so they are rarely discussed.
| 01 · Lignin | Graded lignin for resins, adhesives and carbon materials Launching |
|---|---|
| 02 · More lignin | Deeper lignin recovery and chemical recovery upgrades In development |
| 03 · Organic acids | Organic acids from plant sugars for renewable chemicals In development |
Together, lignin and these organic acids are renewable alternatives to petroleum products.
Add a new product line in one of two ways: host it with no investment and share the income, or buy the system at about half of the installed capital of competing systems. Either way, your mill can move step by step to deeper recovery and renewable chemicals.
Recover graded lignin from black liquor and sell it as a new product line instead of burning it. Taking lignin out also unloads your recovery boiler and relieves a costly bottleneck.
Recover more of the lignin and recycle cooking chemicals more cost-effectively.
Turn the organic acids from plant sugars, otherwise sent to the recovery boiler, into renewable chemicals, so more of what the mill buys leaves as product.
We welcome black liquor samples from any alkaline pulping operation.
02 / An industry first
Each fraction is matched to its best market. Most lignin buyers have never been offered this. Most suppliers sell one broad lignin from one feedstock. We recover high-quality lignin from softwood, hardwood and grasses, including bagasse, bamboo and napier grass, and then split it so you can choose the chemistry that suits your product.
The industry benchmark. A condensed, reactive structure that suits resins and carbon materials.
More linear and less condensed. Blends easily into polymers and gives lighter-colored grades.
Rarely recovered at high quality. H units and p-coumarate and ferulate groups give grass lignin functions that wood lignin lacks.
More hydroxyl groups per gram and better compatibility. Suited to resins, polyols, epoxies and cosmetic formulations.
Longer chains and more thermal stability. Suited to carbon fiber, battery anodes, rubber fillers and asphalt.
Applications for sustainable lignin, from proven uses that replace phenol today to the carbon materials behind next-generation batteries. This is an indicative guide to where each feedstock and fraction performs best. We tailor grades to each customer’s specification.
| Market | Feedstock | MW fraction | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SoftwoodG | HardwoodS + G | GrassesH + G + S | Low MW | High MW | |
Ratings are indicative and based on published lignin research and typical industry use. Final suitability depends on purity, ash content, color and the customer’s process.
Don’t see your application? Some of the best lignin products haven’t been built yet, because the right lignin wasn’t available. Tell us what you’re working on.
Propose a new applicationMany product ideas stall because no supplier offered the right lignin: the wrong feedstock, too broad a molecular weight, too much ash or too dark a color. We supply grass, hardwood and softwood lignins in defined fractions, so you can finally test the idea.
R&D and product teams replacing fossil phenols, polyols, carbon black or synthetic carbons, or qualifying a second lignin source.
Researchers who need well-characterized lignin from known feedstocks, with consistent fractions for repeatable results and publications.
Founders and inventors with a lignin-based product idea who need samples now and a supply partner that can scale with them.
05 / Why Lignin Corporation
We build, run and sell; you host and share the income.
We design our own equipment, fabricate, and assemble in modular units to accelerate installation and reduce cost.
We split lignin by molecular weight and composition, each matched to its best market.
06 / Beyond the kraft mill
Our initial focus is existing pulp and paper operations and the lignin markets they can supply. The same technology improves the economics of other biorefineries too.
A new kind of pulp mill, sized to local supplies of bagasse, energy grasses and bamboo. With our technology, a 300-tonne-per-day mill can compete with mills ten times its size, needs no recovery boiler, and returns potassium to the fields that grew the fiber.
A data center and a biorefinery sharing one steam cycle. Data centers can have power in 12–24 months, the biorefinery uses the heat, and more than 80% of the fuel energy is put to work.
07 / Where we are
Our pilot plant is under construction and will be operational in Q1 2027.
We welcome black liquor samples from any alkaline pulping operation.
We are actively speaking with prospective lignin buyers so we can deliver exactly the lignin ingredients their products need.
08 / Contact
Email: info@lignin.bio