About Institute of Chemical Industry of Forest Products, Chinese Academy of Forestry

Institute of Chemical Industry of Forest Products, Chinese Academy of Forestry

Overview and Mandate

The Institute of Chemical Industry of Forest Products (ICIFP), in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, is the Chinese Academy of Forestry (CAF) institute for the chemical utilisation of forest products — the conversion of wood and non-wood forest raw materials into industrial chemicals and materials. Its researchers describe it as the only specialised institute in China engaging in the chemistry and utilisation of forest products. Founded in 1960 in Nanjing, it is one of the institutes of CAF, China's national comprehensive forest research institution, established in 1958. Its campus address, No. 16 Suojin Five Village in Nanjing (postcode 210042), appears on decades of research in pine chemicals, activated carbon, tannins, essential oils and, increasingly, biomass energy and materials.

The chemical utilisation of forest products, as the institute's scientists define the field, covers the chemical processing of both wood and non-wood forest raw materials to produce goods necessary to the national economy: wood pulp and paperboard, wood-based activated carbon, oleoresin chemicals such as gum rosin and turpentine, vegetable tannins, essential oils and plant extracts. ICIFP is the research centre around which China's forest chemicals industry — more than a thousand factories by the institute's account — developed its technology.

Founding and the Pine Chemicals Centre

The institute was founded in 1960 in Nanjing. Its Section of Oleoresin Chemistry, founded the same year, became the pine chemicals research centre of China, staffed by more than thirty research scientists and technicians together with master's and doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers. The section's fields, as set out by the institute's senior scientist Song Zhanqian, are tapping techniques and tools for pine oleoresin; processing technology; new reprocessed and deep-processed products of rosin and turpentine; and the composition of oleoresin and related basic studies. The institute comprises eight research sections working across the different fields of forest product resources, and it hosts the National Quality Supervision and Inspection Station of Forest Chemicals, giving it an official quality-testing role for the industry's products alongside its research.

The institute's scientific leadership reflects its standing. Song Zhanqian, a professor and member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering who served as a chief scientist of the Chinese Academy of Forestry, spent more than forty years on the chemical modification and application of forest products resources, especially pine chemicals. Shen Zhaobang, professor and doctoral supervisor at the institute, chaired the Society of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of Forest Products of the Chinese Society of Forestry — the professional society of the discipline the institute leads.

Pine Chemicals: Rosin and Turpentine

China's pine chemicals industry is the institute's home ground, and it is a world-scale industry: China's annual gum rosin output exceeds 500,000 tonnes, taking first place in the world, and rosin exports of more than 300,000 tonnes a year account for about sixty per cent of world trade. The institute's reviews trace how the research system it leads turned a crude tapping industry into a deep-processing one. Reprocessed products of pine chemicals — disproportionated rosin and polymerised rosin among them — have been exported successively since the 1980s; the processing technology for polyterpene resin was exported in 1998; and China can now produce nearly all the reprocessed products available in the world, with total producing capacity above 100,000 tonnes a year, accounting for about twenty per cent of rosin and fifty per cent of turpentine output. The pine chemicals industry, the institute concludes, has become the pillar of China's forest chemicals industry.

The trajectory matters to the institute's profile because it demonstrates its model of work: fundamental studies of oleoresin composition, tapping and processing technology, and the development of higher-value derivatives feed directly into an export industry centred on the pine forests of southern China.

The Wider Forest Chemicals Field

Beyond pine chemicals, the institute's field is the whole chemistry of forest raw materials. The wood-based branch of the discipline processes logs, chips and sawdust into pulp, paper and paperboard, charcoal and wood-based activated carbon — Chinese output of wood-based activated carbon was about 60,000 tonnes a year in the institute's survey account. The non-wood branch processes leaves, bark, exudates, fruits, seeds and flowers into gum rosin and turpentine, tannin extracts, tannic and gallic acids, shellac, essential oils and biologically active substances for pharmaceutical preparations, together with series of further-processed products. In total, the industry the institute serves was surveyed as producing annually about two million tonnes of wood pulp, 400,000–500,000 tonnes of gum rosin, 60,000–70,000 tonnes of turpentine oil, 60,000 tonnes of wood-based activated carbon, 10,000 tonnes of vegetable tannins and 10,000 tonnes of essential oils and plant extracts.

Earlier international assessments noted the Nanjing institute — then also rendered in English as the Research Institute of Chemical Processing and Utilization of Forest Products — assisting in establishing raw material bases, formulating policy to protect resources, supporting new products and technology, and providing engineering design of plant in its field: the full chain from resource to factory.

Biomass Energy and Materials Platforms

In the twenty-first century the institute's Nanjing campus has become a national centre for biomass chemical utilisation. It hosts the National Engineering Laboratory for Biomass Chemical Utilization; the Key Laboratory of Chemical Engineering of Forest Products of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (successor to the State Forestry Administration's key and open laboratory of forest chemical engineering); the Key Laboratory of Biomass Energy and Material of Jiangsu Province; and a role in the Jiangsu Co-Innovation Center for Efficient Processing and Utilization of Forest Resources with Nanjing Forestry University. These platforms mark the discipline's evolution — traced in a 2020 disciplinary history co-authored from the institute — from traditional forest chemicals toward biomass chemical engineering: the conversion of lignocellulosic residues into fuels, chemicals and advanced materials.

Research in Biomass Conversion

Institute publications show the new programme at work. With the University of Tennessee's Center for Renewable Carbon, institute researchers including Jianchun Jiang coupled hydropyrolysis with vapour-phase catalytic hydrotreatment to produce biomethane from pine sawdust, fully converting tar intermediates and reaching a maximum carbon yield of 77.7 per cent with 97.8 per cent selectivity. Other institute teams studied wood vinegar derived from Chinese fir waste — a pyrolysis liquid from one of China's most widely planted timber species — characterising its growth-regulation performance on plants and its mechanisms. In materials chemistry, institute researchers fabricated a lignin-based thermoset alternative to formaldehyde-based wood adhesives: by simply mixing wood flour, alkali lignin and a commercial crosslinker and hot-pressing, they produced formaldehyde-free particleboards with a biomass content of 75 per cent and an internal bonding strength of 1.42 MPa, outperforming many other bio-based adhesives. Tung oil, a traditional Chinese forest product, appears in institute work on waterborne extreme-pressure lubricant additives — an example of classical forest chemicals being re-engineered for modern applications.

Publishing and the Discipline's Journal

The institute publishes through the CAF journal system, and its own journal, Chemistry and Industry of Forest Products, is the discipline's principal Chinese periodical: the journal's 2004 supplement carried the institute's authoritative reviews of pine chemicals research and of the chemical utilisation of forest products in China, written by its senior scientists. Through the journal, its quality-inspection station and its leadership of the professional society, the Nanjing institute functions as the organisational centre of Chinese forest chemical science as well as its largest research producer.

Role within the Chinese Academy of Forestry

Within CAF, the Institute of Chemical Industry of Forest Products represents the industrial-chemistry wing of forest science: where other academy institutes grow, protect and measure forests, the Nanjing institute converts what forests yield — resin, bark, leaves, wood and processing residues — into chemicals and materials. Founded in 1960 as China's only specialised institute in its field, builder of the pine chemicals research system that made China the world's largest rosin producer and exporter, and now host of the national engineering laboratory for biomass chemical utilisation, it connects the chemistry of the forest to industries from paper and adhesives to biofuels and advanced materials.