Fungal behavior and recent developments in biopulping technology

Biological pretreatment of wood chips by fungi is a well-known approach prior to mechanical- or chemical pulp production. For this biological approach, a limited number of white-rot fungi with an ability to colonize and selectively degrade lignin are used to pretreat wood chips allowing the remaining cellulose to be processed for further applications. Biopulping is an environmentally friendly technology that can reduce the energy consumption of traditional pulping processes. Fungal pretreatment also reduces the pitch content in the wood chips and improves the pulp quality in terms of brightness, strength, and bleachability. The bleached biopulps are easier to refine compared to pulps produced by conventional methodology. In the last decades, biopulping has been scaled up with pilot trials towards industrial level, with optimization of several intermediate steps and improvement of economic feasibility. Nevertheless, fundamental knowledge on the biochemical mechanisms involved in biopulping is still lacking. Overall, biopulping technology has advanced rapidly during recent decades and pilot mill trials have been implemented. The use of fungi as pretreatment for pulp production is in line with modern circular economy strategies and can be implemented in existing production plants. In this review, we discuss some recent advances in biopulping technology, which can improve mechanical-, chemical-, and organosolv pulping processes along with their mechanisms.