Lignin is a natural and renewable organic compound that can be easily obtained from spent pulping liquors. It can be used as feedstock for making wood adhesives. Nonetheless, lignins need to be modified to enhance reactivity prior to being used as feedstock for making wood adhesives. Appropriate crosslinkers are also needed to ensure the bonding quality of the ligninbased wood adhesives. In the present review, the drawbacks of using lignins alone as wood adhesives, modifications to enhance the reactivity of lignins and production of lignin-based copolymer adhesives for composite wood panels are reviewed and discussed. The objective of this review is to provide background information about the recent status on the development of lignin-based copolymer adhesives for the production of composite wood panels as well as the future prospects of these adhesives in industry. Several modifications such as demethylation, oxidation, methylolation, phenolation, reduction and hydrolysis have shown promising results for enhancing the reactivity of lignins. Several crosslinkers such as phenolic resin, tannin, polymethylene polyphenyl isocyanate (pMDI), furfural and ethylenimine are capable of copolymerizing with lignins to produce lignin-based wood adhesives. The performance of composite wood panels bonded with modified lignin-based copolymer adhesives have been shown to meet the requirements of relevant standards. The main obstacles for the composite wood panels industry to widely adopt to lignin-based copolymer adhesives are the economic and technical issues. Nevertheless, lignin modification methods are proving to enhance the reactivity of lignins and the optimization in such modification methods would justify the economic issue. Together with the public awareness on the safety, health and environment concerns, the utilization of lignin-based adhesives in the composite wood panels industry is feasible.

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The lack of knowledgeable and skilled workers is a major challenge faced by the Malaysian furniture sector. It hinders industrial productivity and its ability to move up the value-chain by adopting high technology. Therefore, in order to assess the awareness and readiness of the Malaysian furniture industry for Industry 4.0, a questionnaire-based survey was conducted with a sample of 778 large-, medium-, and small-sized furniture manufacturers throughout Malaysia. This study is part of an on-going Erasmus+ program funded by the European Commission, initiated in 2018 to develop a university-level education program to train workers capable of handling Industry 4.0 technologies for the furniture and wood industry in Malaysia. The results revealed that manufacturers of wood-based panel and metal furniture were more prepared to adopt automation and Industry 4.0 technologies compared to solid-wood and leather furniture manufacturers. The benefits from Industry 4.0 technologies include increased production capacity, product diversity, cost competitiveness, and workforce reduction. Further, the results of this study suggest that the lack of knowledgeable and skilled workers to handle Industry 4.0 technology is a concern among furniture manufacturers, and possibly the proposed university-level Industry 4.0 program may be beneficial to train workers for the future of the industry.