The Role of Adhesion and Adhesives in the Wood Products Industry,

The phenomenon of adhesion plays an important role in over 70 percent of all wood and wood-based products, including paper products. The future of the wood industry will require an even higher dependence on operations involving adhesion, a trend fostered partially by the changing character of the forest resource, partially by the need to extract greater quantities of wood from the same forest base, and partially from the newly recognized potential for producing new wood materials with superior properties to serve a variety of engineering needs. The growth of knowledge on the subject of adhesives and adhesion has produced some exciting scientific and technical discoveries. More discoveries of equal importance are possible and can be anticipated, with much of the driving force coming from the need to find substitutes for the threatened shortage of petrochemicals. This symposium and others to follow will help greatly in accelerating the achievement of this objective. Author