A profitable and sustainable biorefining process will facilitate its scale-up production. In this study, we combined the advantages of both organic acid-based DES and polyol-based DES into a new ternary DES basing on the lignin-first biorefinery to fractionate bamboo, directly obtained a superstrong lignin adhesive and improved enzymatic saccharification. This integrated DES could enhance the enzymatic saccharification yield to 100 % by substantial removals of lignin (76.25 %) and xylan (79.72 %). Remarkably, the obtained lignin was modified and stabilized by polyols during the fractionation, possessing a well-stabilized β-O-4 structure (as high as 42.66/100Ar), which showed excellent adhesion performance of dry and wet bonding strength (1.87/1.62 MPa), outperforming the commercial phenolic resin and urea resin for plywood production. The formation mechanism of the lignin adhesive was comprehensively studied and demonstrated to be the graft reactions induced by the diol hydroxyl tails onto the α position of lignin’s side chain via etherification. This work proved that the combination of organic acid and polyol-based DES is an ideal strategy to generate a formaldehyde-free plywood adhesive and digestible carbohydrates as coproducts.
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