Abstract
The forest-based sector plays diverse roles among the emerging bio-based industries. The goal of this study is to examine how forest product markets could develop in the face of a growing bioeconomy and which interdependencies occur between traditional and emerging forest-based sectors. Therefore, we analyze the development of dissolving pulp together with lignocellulose-based textile fibres and chemical derivatives in a partial equilibrium model. For this purpose, we extend the product structure of the Global Forest Products Model (GFPM) and analyze three different bioeconomy scenarios from 2015 to 2050. The simulation results show that, in a scenario where the world is changing toward a sustainable bio-economy, wood consumption patterns shift away from fuelwood (−30% by 2050) and classical paper products (−32% by 2050) towards emerging wood-based products. In this context, the dissolving pulp subsector could outpace the continuously shrinking paper pulp subsector by 2050. To develop in this way, the dissolving pulp subsector mainly uses released resources from the decreasing paper pulp production. Simultaneously, wood-based panels are finding increasing application (+196% by 2050) and thus are taking over potential markets for sawn wood, for which production growth remains limited. Our results also show that, until 2050, the production of many wood-based products will take place mainly in Asia instead of North America and Europe.
Highlights
Today, the shift from a petroleum-based to a more bio-based and sustainable industry is not primarily a matter of the depletion of fossil resources, but rather the response to demands from an increasingly ecologically conscious society
Wood product market analysis needs to consider these changes by implementing emerging values from wood such as innovative usages of wood, like sandwich panels, or the emerging lignocellulose-based products like dissolving pulp
The present study did this by adapting global forest product modelling and implementing emerging lignocellulose-based products into the extended version of the Global Forest Products Model (GFPM)
Summary
The shift from a petroleum-based to a more bio-based and sustainable industry is not primarily a matter of the (looming) depletion of fossil resources, but rather the response to demands from an increasingly ecologically conscious society. Among the bio-based resources, lignocellulosic biomass from wood is both an abundant and a very versatile raw material [1]. Wood serves to satisfy many needs of daily life, e.g., as a fuel for power and heating, or as input for the construction, furniture, paperboard, textile, and chemical industries. This lets the forest-based sector play diverse roles in a growing bioeconomy [2]. Since wood is a multifunctional raw material, the forest sector faces various and potentially conflicting demands from different traditional and emerging wood-using sectors. Different industries continuously improve their production efficiency and introduce innovative product developments such as sandwich panels [7] or new product applications based on, e.g., dissolved lignocellulose
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