Certain clusters of technology have earned a place in our cultural imagination. Detroit is Motor City. There’s Silicon Valley just south of San Francisco Bay, Research Triangle in North Carolina, and the Route 128 Tech Corridor in Massachusetts. Perhaps someday, if a new collaboration of entrepreneurs, policymakers, and research scientists realize their dream, we might add “The North Woods Innovation Circle” or “Maine’s Nanofiber Forest” to that list.
“We’ve been calling it ‘Nanocellulose Valley’ now for probably 10 years,” said Jake Ward, vice president for Innovation and Economic Development at University of Maine. “That’s still on our website.”
As geomorphically inaccurate as the term might seem, the phenomenon itself is very real. Built mainly on research originating at UMaine and in the state’s once formidable pulp and paper industry, a cluster of start-ups, pilot projects, and early-stage commercial manufacturers are developing a new class of forest products that could someday challenge petroleum, plastics, and a host of other environmentally damaging materials. In doing so, these entrepreneurs won’t simply be chasing profits; they also hope to bolster employment opportunities in Maine, reinvigorate forest-based communities, and keep the North Woods safe from overdevelopment.
Beginning with this issue, Northern Woodlands will publish a series of three articles exploring the prospects and perils facing Maine-based entrepreneurs who are working to move innovative forest products out of the lab and into the global marketplace. The series will share stories that have led to (or resulted from) discoveries that seem to emerge from the pages of science fiction, as well as those that one entrepreneur terms “ancient-future technology” – products developed here more than 100 years ago but only now finding commercial application.
These articles will feature Mainers who have pioneered new businesses and those serving in these businesses’ labor forces. And they will explore the connections of this work to land stewardship goals such as habitat enhancement, carbon storage and sequestration, and vibrant, forest-supported rural communities.
“The amazing thing about this new sector is that it still starts at the tree trunk,” said Steve Levesque, Maine’s former commissioner of the Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD), who is now working with the town of Lincoln to repurpose a 400-acre paper mill site into a new forest technology park. “Nanocellulose, biochar, biofuels…these represent a way to recreate an economy that has always been focused on the forest. It’s a new age of forest utilization, development, and sustainability, but every industry relies on its supply chain, and having the logistics, workforce, and history in place in this region will make it that much easier to grow here.”
“These new products have the potential to pick up the slack in demand for low-grade wood,” agreed Brian Souers, president of Treeline, a diversified forest management company located just a few miles from the proposed technology park in Lincoln. Souers launched his business with a chainsaw and a horse named Captain in 1981 and has thrived during the cyclical ups and downs of papermaking because of a willingness to embrace innovation and clean technologies; this year, Treeline is installing a commercial solar kiln at its sawmill. “The more valuable you can make the forest, the better it will be for loggers, truckers, communities, and the forest itself,” he said.
A Tech Hub is Born
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle first said that “nature abhors a vacuum,” and this is also true of natural resource-based economies. When pulp and paper mills dotted the Maine landscape 50 years ago – directly employing 18,000 workers and creating thousands of additional jobs in logging, trucking, and other skilled supply-support sectors – it left little of the proverbial “oxygen in the room” for small, innovative start-ups. The mills provided secure, high-paying jobs with unmatched benefits and bought nearly all the low-grade wood coming out of the forest.
But when global trends initiated a massive retraction in the pulp and paper industry at the turn of the century, the state lost 22 mills – including 5 in an 18-month span between 2014 and 2016 – and with that, 72 percent of the jobs the industry once provided. While the remaining mills planned or made significant investments to move to new products that included higher-end paper and packaging materials, state officials and industry leaders scrambled to develop a plan to keep the working forests working.
“We recognized that we were losing some of our low-grade markets,” said Patrick J. Strauch, executive director of the Maine Forest Products Council. “In Maine, we like to sell every part of the tree. We don’t just harvest trees for logs or pulpwood or just have a harvest to get biomass. We merchandise trees into the different components to get the highest value. So when we lost five pulp mills on the Penobscot River in such a short amount of time, that kind of decimated our outlet for softwood.”
By one estimate, those closures created a huge void; some four to five million tons a year of demand for low-grade wood disappeared almost overnight.
Out of this moment came the Forest Opportunity Roadmap for Maine (FOR/Maine). Drafted by a multidisciplinary group of policymakers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and investors, the roadmap, which was published in September 2018, analyzed current trends and looked into the future of the state’s forest-based economy. FOR/Maine noted that the “manufacturing of value-added forest products, such as advanced biofuels, biobased chemicals, bioplastics, nanocellulose, and other advanced materials are attractive compliments [sic] to Maine’s traditional wood products.” Among the 5 goals and 16 strategies developed, many focused on the need to diversify the forest product mix, not only to help “sell every part of the tree” but also to insulate the state’s economy from another downturn in a single, massive market.
In a mono-product forest economy, current DECD Commissioner Heather Johnson explained, the entire supply chain is vulnerable to a downturn at the top. If the paper mill is the only game in town, and it goes under, it’s not just the employees who lose jobs. Every logger, trucker, plumber, banker, and insurance agent feels the impact, and the ripple effect could lead to closures and dislocation.
“So, in order to keep capacity in the logging community, for example, we need to have a wide range of markets,” Johnson said. “Having more markets makes every piece of wood more valuable, and the whole supply chain benefits from that. Otherwise, you may not have the infrastructure and workforce that is critical for new businesses that want to come here.”
Fortunately, FOR/Maine’s plan didn’t sit on a shelf collecting dust. Its authors continued to position Maine, as outlined in the plan, “as a leader in the global forest bio-economy to national and global audiences,” setting a 2025 deadline to realize many of FOR/Maine’s ambitions.
Almost on schedule, their efforts were recognized in January 2025 when the U.S. Department of Commerce awarded $22 million to the Maine Forest Bioproducts Advanced Manufacturing Tech Hub, a coalition of more than 70 organizations led by the Maine Technology Institute. The award announcement from the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) called the money an investment in the state’s already demonstrated ability to “advance a critical technology important to American economic and national security.”
“Maine companies are leading the way in manufacturing innovative and environmentally friendly products that are changing how the world builds homes and businesses, and packages products, and more,” Governor Janet Mills said at the time, calling the award “the next great chapter of Maine’s storied forest products industry. This significant federal investment will help Maine cement its growing reputation as a global leader in the advanced manufacturing of forest bioproducts.”
While the forest emphasis is unique to Maine’s tech hub, the cluster approach is not. There are now 31 federally designated tech hubs in 21 states. The regional hub approach leverages proximity between raw materials, supplies, and manufacturers, and often builds on the shared technical expertise of research universities and their alumni. So far, the EDA has selected 18 of these hubs for implementation funding that totals $714 million and has already generated more than $6 billion in investments “and other commitments” from private and public organizations.
Leaders in Maine’s Tech Hub hope to use half of the award to support “climate-forward” forest-based biomaterial production and applied technology to displace plastics, improve carbon storage and sequestration, and eliminate the sources of toxic materials in the environment. The other half is slated to go to UMaine’s efforts to commercialize research and advance pilot projects to production scale in the fast-moving sector.
“We’re trying to build on our international reputation,” said Jake Ward, part of the FOR/Maine leadership over the past decade. “Already we’re the largest supplier of nanocellulose materials in the world. We’re building out our sustainable packaging initiative with some of the biggest names in consumer product and packaging companies. People are already looking to Maine to solve problems and innovate materials.”
First Fruits
Ward points to TimberHP as an example of the ways in which FOR/Maine’s vision for the state’s forest products industry is coming to fruition. The company, which creates energy-efficient building insulation from wood fiber, closed on a $130 million round of financing in 2023 and is now manufacturing its three product lines in a once-shuttered paper mill in Madison. The wood fiber used is renewable and recyclable, nontoxic, and carbon storing – and cost-competitive with the pink fiberglass it seeks to displace.
“That’s getting national attention,” Ward said, noting that the company has been featured in national publications, trade magazines, and most recently in “This Old House” on PBS.
TimberHP and several of the other first fruits of the FOR/Maine project are creating “drop-in” alternatives to replace products used in existing environments, applications, and machinery. At the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, for instance, DG Fuels is planning to break ground in 2026 on a $4.13 billion sustainable aviation fuel facility. The “low to zero carbon” fuel, made from gasified wood biomass, can be used in existing aircraft when mixed with conventional petroleum-based fuel (needed to lubricate the airplane’s moving parts) and reduces life cycle carbon emissions by 85 percent. That has airlines, including Delta and Air France-KLM, lining up to sign offtake agreements to purchase the product.
Another fiber-to-fuel company, Biofine Developments Northeast, has signed a lease to build a refinery on the site of the former Lincoln Pulp & Tissue Mill, which closed in 2015. Steve Levesque said permitting for the project is essentially complete, and he expects construction to begin later this year.
When the first phase is finalized, the company expects to produce about 3 million gallons of ethyl levulinate from slash, woody biomass, and low-value thinnings. “EL,” as it’s called, can serve as a drop-in replacement for traditional home heating oil or a blend for diesel fuels, while other byproducts from the refining process are used as manufacturing chemicals, food preservatives, flavorings, and solvents.
Biofine has also landed an offtake agreement with Sprague Resources LP, which will purchase and market EL produced at Biofine’s Lincoln production facility. Dave Glendon, president and CEO of Sprague, said his company was excited to “contribute to the region’s decarbonization goals while leveraging existing heating system infrastructure and supporting consumer choices.”
The goal of all these drop-in product manufacturers, said TimberHP’s CEO Josh Henry, is “presenting a proposition to the customer: you can have these two products, they perform equally well – and maybe this product actually performs better – they cost the same, and this product is renewable, recyclable, nontoxic, and carbon sequestering. It’s kind of a no-brainer.”
TimberHP is also a model for more nascent start-up companies looking to commercialize their forest-based technologies. Standard Biocarbon, for instance, is currently producing biochar at a small facility in Enfield and looking to expand. Biochar is a charcoal-like substance made by heating biomass – low-grade wood, slash, and wood chips – in a nearly oxygen-free process called pyrolysis. The end product can be used in a variety of applications, including soil amendments, pollution remediation, construction materials, and even carbon sequestration. At scale, CEO Fred Horton said, the process could also produce “many, many megawatts of renewable electricity.”
“We can preserve the local forestry culture,” Horton said of emerging forest technology companies. “We can preserve and enhance the forest itself by providing a market for low-grade wood. We can enhance circular food systems and agriculture and provide responses to climate change and accumulated pollution.”
These characteristics, he said, are exactly what consumers want from their brands: “They are looking to support businesses that preserve local ecosystems, cultural ecosystems, and communities.”
“The tailwinds are significant,” agreed Melissa LaCasse, founder and CEO of Tanbark, a start-up that produces Type 3 molded fiber containers and packaging that could replace single-use plastics in industries from electronics to cosmetics. “Human health trends are going to drive it. Countries are introducing taxes and regulations to curtail products that introduce PFAS and microplastics into the environment. Additionally, there’s just consumer sentiment – they do not want plastic. They do not want bioplastic. They want paper-based products.”
Ancient-Future Technology at Tanbark
LaCasse may well be the most articulate and persuasive spokesperson for the new forest bioproducts cluster. Having worked in public radio, she’s a natural storyteller with the precision and authoritative voice of a commercial airline pilot – something she also trained and is licensed for.
LaCasse said she was moved to act because of the damage that a plastics-and-petroleum-based economy had inflicted on the world in which her children lived. Many of our current challenges – climate change, environmental degradation, public health impacts – can be traced back, she said, to the postwar explosion in what she calls “carbon-heavy technology.”
“I’d venture to guess that a lot of companies grouped under the ‘forest bioproducts’ banner are based on technologies of olden times,” she said. “I call it ‘ancient-future technology,’ but it was largely set aside in the ’50s and ’60s because plastic came along.”
At Tanbark, LaCasse is looking to reclaim packaging from plastics, especially single-use plastics, using pulp-based Type 3 molded fiber (also known as encapsulated drying), a technology invented in Maine more than 100 years ago. She became acquainted with the opportunity because her husband’s family business, LaCasse and Westin, specializes in building machines for molded fiber manufacturers. But while most of those companies focus on commodity products – think of products like nursery garden pots (Type 1), egg cartons (Type 2) and Chinet paper plates (Type 3) – Tanbark produces high-end, highly customized sustainable Type 3 packaging at production levels accessible to brands of all sizes.
Tanbark opened a 10,000 square-foot manufacturing facility in Saco in July 2023 with two main product lines custom-built by LaCasse and Westin, enabling Tanbark to design and create specialty packaging not previously available in Type 3 molded fiber anywhere else. The engineering trick is to render highly detailed surface finishes (logos, for instance) on a strong package or container with thin walls, consistently and uniformly, producing between 1 and 4 tons a day. Prototypes of various shapes and sizes pepper the office space at the facility, along with samples from existing companies such as Maine-based seafood restaurant chain Luke’s Lobsters.
Tanbark’s raw material is dry lap: sheets of dried pulp that look, from a distance, like plain old cardboard. These are manufactured by a Maine paper mill, using sustainably harvested low-value trees. Tanbark’s machines mix the dry lap pulp with water and pour the resulting liquid into a series of heated, high-pressure molds. The end product is characterized by thin walls and smooth surfaces – the same characteristics as plastic competitors, but achieved in a far more energy-efficient way, and without their harmful impacts on the environment.
“When we end up in the woods or the ocean, we go away. We’re not going to be around for hundreds of years,” LaCasse said of her products, which are both recyclable and compostable. “And it’s not even just that plastic’s going to hang around; it’s the microplastics that are being shed and that are entering the body…Cellulose-based products are the answer. There’s no reason if you get an appliance, or you get an electronic device or you get any product that comes nested, for it to be in thermoform plastic. So, this is about companies making the right choice, and their consumers are starting to really demand that they do.”
Tanbark’s approach to growth is as methodical as it is practical. After establishing the business with small-volume clients who were unable to source custom Type 3 molded fiber products anywhere else, LaCasse has begun reaching out to higher-volume businesses and said she had some “pretty big names” in the pipeline for limited-run production. “If we’re successful with their initial projects,” she reasoned, “we’re first in line to help them with their other transitions as well.”
The company is on track to outgrow the Saco facility in 2026, and LaCasse plans to add a second manufacturing site when that happens. She’s hoping to co-locate on a site with an existing Maine pulp provider, cutting out transportation costs for her raw materials. But despite the prospects, the future cannot come quickly enough for LaCasse – as both a CEO and a “future ancestor.”
“Companies need to do better at providing their consumers with choices,” she said. “If I were in one of these big brands, and didn’t have a group working on this with someone like Tanbark, I’d be seriously worried. If you’re not doing research and development on this right now, you’re going to have a capacity issue in 10 years, because every company that is working on it now will have a long leg up.”
What’s in a Name?
Grouping together businesses such as TimberHP, Standard Biocarbon, and Tanbark poses an interesting marketing challenge. Unlike automobiles, for instance, it’s hard to quickly comprehend what constitutes “Forest Bioproducts Advanced Manufacturing.” What do these companies have in common? Raw material and a deeply engrained environmental ethic, perhaps – but not the end products that tend to capture the public’s imagination.
Nanocellulose – one of the biggest opportunities on the horizon – demonstrates the issue. Sometimes called cellulose nanofiber, nanocellulose is produced by a multistep process that fractionates wood’s complex structure, isolates cellulose fibers, and breaks those down into nanoscale dimensions: one nanometer is about 1/100,000th the width of a human hair. At that level, the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of the fiber are vastly different from what we might recognize as tree pulp.
Many of the new commercial applications use nanocellulose to make other things: packaging, 3D-printed housing materials and boat hulls, circuit boards, and additives to strengthen conventional building materials. Shane O’Neill, forest industry business development manager at University of Maine, says the material can also be used as a preservative coating for fruit, a replacement for plastics in biomedical and medical applications, artificial bone material, and a carrier for fish vaccines. Following the tragic fires in and around Los Angeles in early 2025, a lot of media attention focused on the development of nanocellulose-based fire suppressants, which are PFAS-free.
Jake Ward uses the term “additive manufacturing” to describe some of these applications, which currently deploy nanocellulose in one of two forms: a slurry, composed of 3 percent fiber and 97 percent water, or as concentrated, freeze-dried nanocellulose. The slurry looks like watered-down instant mashed potatoes, while the freeze-dried version resembles large granulated sugar.
“People are using this as a fundamental building block,” he explained, “and one of the common pain points that the Tech Hub is trying to solve is how people can buy this as an off-the-shelf ingredient.”
Beyond nanocellulose, biofuels, and biochar, innovative “macro” wood-based products provide alternatives to carbon-expensive products such as concrete and steel in the construction industry. They include mass timber, such as glulam beams, cross-laminated timber, and nail-laminated timber, and composites such as oriented strand board, fiberboard, and wood-plastic composites.
“We’re actually making something, providing jobs for people at every level of the socioeconomic scale,” Melissa LaCasse said. “So how do we create investment in those companies that are actually turning that engine on and accelerating their growth and their scale? I think the Tech Hub is a great first step toward getting some attention to that activity.”
A New Conservation Tool
If it is to be successful, entrepreneurs insist, the new forest bio-products industry needs to educate the public about sustainability, from feedstock to disposal. The most important part of this process may be challenging the idea that cutting down trees is always bad for the environment.
Fred Horton, the Standard Biocarbon CEO, said consumers today want to do the right thing, but the sustainability message must be unambiguous. “The public will support businesses that preserve local ecosystems, cultural ecosystems, and communities and preserve our incredibly important forests,” he said, enumerating what he calls the “virtuous/value pillars” of the forest bioproducts business.
Tanbark’s sustainability message, said LaCasse, goes like this: We take a natural feedstock that is sustainably harvested – one that supports highly effective carbon capture – and use a natural process to create packaging and products that break down at the end of their life cycle without harming the earth.
“The working forest is the best carbon capture machine in the world,” LaCasse said. “Forests that are being sustainably harvested and constantly regrowing also provide great habitat for many species, including a number of endangered species. We know that old-growth forests are important for carbon storage and provide biodiversity, but new forests play a huge part in sustainability, and the combination is an incredibly great thing for the planet. And of course, if we don’t provide full utilization of these forests, which in Maine are often privately held, they will be utilized in ways that aren’t great for the environment.”
That message isn’t coming only from the business community. Karin Tilburg, the former president of the Forest Society of Maine, said that conservation easements and acquisitions will not, by themselves, keep the 10- to 12-million-acre North Woods intact and undeveloped.
“That’s three and a half times the size of Connecticut,” Tilburg pointed out. “It is so unique in its lack of development and fragmentation from division, subdivision, and public roads. So, if you start with the premise that you want to hold on to the whole thing, the question becomes how do you do that? Easements are an important tool protecting 2 to 3 million acres, but that’s not 12 million. What else is there?”
The answer, for a growing number of prominent environmental and conservation groups, is a sustainable forestry bioproducts industry that creates markets for low-grade wood. Convened by the New England Forestry Foundation, the Forest Carbon for Commercial Landowners (FCCL) initiative – a collaboration of state policymakers, researchers, environmental advocates, and large land-owners – is examining ways to manage forests that store more carbon without reducing the overall fiber coming off the land. The group has produced computer models projecting that northern Maine’s commercial forestlands could store at least 20 percent more carbon each year – without reducing harvest levels – by updating forest management practices.
Tilburg said that without the opportunity to make money from their forest holdings, some landowners might decide to “get out of the business” and sell their land to developers. After all, their bills are significant; property taxes (even with Maine’s Tree Growth Tax Law taken into account) continue to rise, private road maintenance costs are increasing due to damage from more frequent and powerful storms, and forest landowners also bear costs related to firefighting, disease prevention, and the like. Already, the state estimates it is losing at least 10,000 acres of forested land to development every year.
“I think opportunities to use the lower-grade woods and thinnings are good news overall for longer rotations, a better diversity of age classes, and healthier forests,” Tilburg said. “So having forest products grow is really important as a conservation tool.”