Forest Bioproducts Research Institute

A revolutionary research project at the University of Maine will help breathe new life into Old Town’s former Georgia-Pacific mill and, according to projections, bring more than 1,000 jobs to the area over the next two years. A group of investors calling itself Red Shield Environmental plans to use the mill and its biomass boiler […]

“Fresh From the Woods” Newsletter- Forests for Maine’s Future “The time will come, in two or three decades, when we will look at the days of only sawing boards and making paper as the Dark Ages,” says Robert G. Wagner, a professor of forestry at the University of Maine. “The chemical versatility of wood is […]

It may seem like a surreal roadtrip to travel from a muddy logging operation deep in Maine’s woodlands to the floor of the U.S. Senate and back to a climate controlled laboratory in Orono, where wood is sheared into tiny nanofibers, eaten by experimental enzymes or cooked down into sugars that will re-emerge as new […]

The Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded more than $1.5 million in federal funding to the University of Maine to advance the university’s ongoing efforts to develop methods for converting biomass from Maine’s forests into fuels and valuable chemicals. The state will contribute 50 percent in matching funds to the multi-faceted project through the Maine […]

Imagine — or maybe you can remember — the looks on Americans’ faces in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. You might see a lot of raised and wrinkled brows in front of a black-and-white glow. But at what was then […]

Imagine — or maybe you can remember — the looks on Americans’ faces in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. You might see a lot of raised and wrinkled brows in front of a black-and-white glow. But at what was then […]

ORONO, Maine — The University of Maine announced today that it has been awarded a $6.9 million research infrastructure improvement grant from the National Science Foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NSF EPSCoR). UMaine is investing a 50 percent match ($3.45 million) for this project through the Maine Economic Improvement Fund, the state’s appropriation […]

This past spring, Georgia-Pacific, the paper-manufacturing giant that brings us such familiar products as Quilted Northern toilet paper, closed down its paper mill in Old Town, Maine — laying off hundreds of workers and dealing a blow to the local economy. With cheaper sources of wood pulp flooding in from countries like Brazil and New […]