May 26, 2025, Oji Paper--When the Spirit of Wood Burns: The Dawn of Biotech Manufacturing

May 26, 2025, Oji Paper--When the Spirit of Wood Burns: The Dawn of Biotech Manufacturing

Oji Paper's newly completed pilot plant is an attempt to symbolize a departure from the era of paper. While using pulp derived from wood, the goal is not paper. This equipment, which refines ethanol by skillfully utilizing the metabolic reactions of microorganisms, has the potential to significantly change the future of the paper industry.

Traditionally, the paper industry has devoted its resources to a single use: paper. However, as demand for paper has gradually declined, Oji Paper has created an industrial model called "bio manufacturing" in order to breathe new life into forestry resources. The challenge is to use woody biomass as a substitute for fossil resources and to expand its applications to fuels, chemical materials, foods, and pharmaceuticals. A factory rooted in the forest is now being connected to the front lines of chemistry and biology.

In this production process, woody material is first decomposed by heat and chemical treatment, and then converted into sugar by enzymes. The resulting sugars are then sent to fermenters, where microorganisms resistant to heat and high alcohol concentrations transform them into ethanol and other useful substances. It is as if invisible microorganisms are awakening the memory of the sun lying dormant in the trees and transforming it into liquid energy.

Furthermore, Oji Paper is not limiting this technology to the mere production of fuel, but is also looking to develop it into a biorefinery. The company is also considering applications as raw materials for bioplastics, intermediates for pharmaceuticals, and functional food ingredients such as rare sugars and oligosaccharides, and this is truly an industrial revolution in which wood speaks the language of chemistry.

Japan's forestry resources have long been treated as low-priced paper pulp. This project, however, paves the way to transform them into high value-added resources. The annual rings carved on the trunks of trees are now about to extend their branches into the future in the midst of a new wave of technology. This step by Oji Paper is a declaration that the papermaking industry will go beyond survival to transformation and evolution, and a landscape of hope where forests and science will once again join hands.