GO Lab Inc., the Belfast company receiving $750,000 from Maine Technology Institute in a competitive grant program for emerging forest technology companies, is planning to buy the former Madison Paper Industries mill that’s been shuttered since 2016.
The Morning Sentinel reported that the company has been looking at the site for about a year and recently came to an agreement to buy the 600,000 square-foot industrial facility owned by Somerset Acquisition LLC.
Joshua Henry, president of GO Lab, told the Waterville newspaper that although the sale hasn’t closed yet the company is hoping to take over ownership by the end of this year and start renovations in 2020.
The company’s goal, which received a significant boost with Tuesday’s announcement of the $750,000 awarded by MTI under the Emerging Technology Challenge for Maine’s Forest Resources competitive grant program, is to create the first facility in North America making wood-based low-density fiberboard insulation. It is sold commercially in Europe, where it competes successfully with polystyrene-based foam insulation derived from fossil fuels, though it is an emerging technology in the United States.
“I think it’s a great market because the Northeast is the densest insulation market in the country,” Henry told the newspaper.
The former paper mill is listed by the Boulos Co. at $2.5 million and includes several large buildings on 12-plus acres, including the main mill, warehouse/shipping facilities, maintenance facilities, and other specialty buildings. Amenities identified in Boulos’s listing including adjacent hydroelectric power, natural gas line, adjacent wastewater treatment plant, river water source and established industrial site.
As reported by Mainebiz on Wednesday, MTI envisions that the $750,000 award to GO Lab will enable the company to scale up and that its wood fiber insulation has strong potential to transform the insulation market in the next 10 years.
“Its insulation, made from wood fiber, is renewable, recyclable, nontoxic and performs as well, or better than, other available insulations,” MTI stated in its news release. “GO Lab’s production facility, located at the former UPM paper mill in Madison, will consume 180,000 tons of softwood chips annually, create 100 jobs and generate approximately $70 million in annual revenue.”
MTI stated that the ambitious goal behind the company’s grant proposal is “to become the leader in manufacturing wood-dominant, environmentally-preferred building materials, and, in doing so, help fill the void left by the demise of paper manufacturing in Madison. That, in turn, would improve the long-term viability of Maine’s rural, forest-based economy.”
In addition to GO Lab, MTI awarded $750,000 to Biofine Developments Northeast, which is pursuing commercial development of the first large scale bio-refinery deploying Biofine’s technology in Bucksport.
The challenge grants are an offshoot of MTI’s collaboration of the Forest Opportunities Roadmap (FOR/Maine) Initiative, which is backed with funding from the federal Economic Development Administration and Department of Agriculture and is actively seeking out and supporting emerging technology companies in the forest resource sector.
Biobased Maine vetted and evaluated proposals submitted for the competitive challenge grants.