Aqueous lignin adhesive for high-performance wood bonding.

Aqueous lignin adhesive achieves high-performance wood bonding with only 20 wt% lignin, outperforming commercial resins in strength and durability.

• Why it matters: Developing sustainable, formaldehyde-free adhesives is crucial for environmentally friendly wood utilization, addressing health and ecological concerns associated with traditional resins.
• What they did: Researchers created a reactive cysteine-functionalized lignin formulation, enabling sprayable, injectable, and self-curing adhesives that work under simple hot-pressing conditions, with 4.0 MPa dry strength and 83.7% wet-strength retention.
• The result: The adhesive exhibits exceptional durability across extreme temperatures, humidity, and solvents, with fracture toughness increased eightfold, paving the way for scalable, bio-based wood bonding solutions.