Wood sticker works with hot glue gun and is reusable

Advanced Materials

With information from New Scientist - 06/23/2025

The new glue could be produced from waste from the pulp and paper industry. [Image: Ziwen Lv et al. - 10.1038/s41893-025-01579-9]

Wood glue for wood

A byproduct of the timber industry has been transformed into a glue for use in hot glue guns, replacing the adhesives of this type used today, which are made from solvents that are toxic to humans and the environment.

And, in addition to being safe, the new bio-inspired glue is reusable.

Ziwen Lv and colleagues at Beijing Forestry University in China created the glue from xylan, a component of plant cell walls. While xylan holds cellulose together in plants, it does not do so in the traditional way that glue works.

The team then re-engineered xylan so that it could function as an on-demand adhesive. To do this, Lv used sodium periodate and sodium borohydride to chemically modify the compound, turning it into dialcohol xylan. The resulting material is a glue that can be extruded by a hot glue gun.

Even without optimizations, the hot glue achieved a bond strength of 30 megapascals, outperforming conventional adhesives, including epoxy resin. The glue could also be reused through remelting, maintaining its original bond strength even after 10 cycles.

The glue is stronger than current ones and much "greener", in addition to being able to be reused up to 10 times. [Image: Ziwen Lv et al. - 10.1038/s41893-025-01579-9]

Better than current stickers

The team also tested their new xylan-based glue to make plywood. The prototypes, which used three thin layers of walnut wood sandwiched together, achieved performance comparable to commercial plywood made with phenol-formaldehyde resin adhesives.

While this would be an advantage for large-scale industrial applications, the resulting plywood is not water-resistant – after immersion in water for an hour, the glue had dissolved, causing the layers to separate. But plywood is not traditionally used for applications where it needs to be in contact with water, so the team believes they have created a real alternative to current adhesives.

The glue will now need to be tested in other applications. But even if it is a wood-based glue that can only be used for wood-based products, it will still be an improvement over all petroleum-based adhesives currently in use. It is worth remembering that plywood is one of the last consumer products to contain phenol and formaldehyde, which were banned in products such as cosmetics years ago.

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