Chemical Solutions for Wood Mills and
Engineered Wood Products
Complete chemistry for effective, efficient, and
environmentally-conscious wood processing including:
cleaners, defoamers, release agents, WESP and RTO Treatments
Your Industry Doesn’t Do ‘Downtime’
You create the wood products that the world relies on. Whether you are trying to hit daily, monthly, or yearly production targets, your time is precious. You can’t focus on meeting your production targets when chemistry becomes your main concern. Because the wrong chemistry impacts not only impact output, it also damages equipment and poses both health and environmental risks. All of which affect your bottom line.
You Need More Than Just Effective Chemistry.
You also need a chemical provider who can deliver under any conditions.
Whether you’re working on a mill floor or up in regional headquarters, your goal is to limit work stoppages—margins are slim and time is money. To optimize continuity, you don’t just need the right chemical solutions, you also need a partner you can rely on to deliver fixes, fast. A partner who answers your call at any time of day and works tirelessly to find the solution that gets operations back up and running.
Solutions
Release Agents
Engineered wood products hinge on release agents, a complex yet critical part of manufacturing. Because whether you are operating a continuous or multi-opening press, there are many variables that affect both the efficiency of your operation and product quality. That’s why we work with you to discover your unique challenges, and design a solution and program that ensure minimal downtimes without sacrificing product quality.
WESP & RTO
Maintaining your WESP system is critical to everyday operations. And while traditional caustic soda solutions have been the go-to for years, these solutions can cause their own issues with scale buildup. That’s why we are constantly developing new, alternative WESP treatment programs that will help you avoid the high downtime and cost of traditional WESP maintenance. The Guardian team will study your system to review site-specific challenges including wood species, feed and recycle water quality, waste handling, disposal resources, foam control and overall system design. We find a formulation and site application technique that works for you.
Cleaning & Degreasing
To keep production rates up, your equipment must be kept clean, both as part of regular and unexpected maintenance. And in engineered wood production, you need highly specialized chemicals to deal with the unique fouling that your equipment can encounter. Our chemical solutions include innovative blends of high performance surfactants, alkalinity boosters, water conditioning agents and corrosion inhibitors. We craft solutions to meet you unique challenges, and can assist with application and disposal.
Defoamers
Foam is an inconvenient byproduct of wood processing that can slow down or stop production when it gets out of control, and the breakdown and clean up process can be time-intensive. We have a developed a range of products that quickly and effectively disperse foam, or can minimize foam before its created. To create a solution that works for the unique conditions in your facility, our in-house and in-field testing technologies available to ensure accurate chemical functions and application rates.
Sanitizing & Disinfecting
Protect the health of everyone in and around your facilities from the visible and invisible bacteria, fungi, and other contaminants that can linger for days in the right environment. Guardian’s wide variety of solutions include several registered with Health Canada. All our hard surface cleaners, sanitizers, and disinfectant chemicals are made to ensure the cleanliness of contaminated surfaces.
There’s No Time to Waste
We create the tailored solutions that not only keep production going but improve efficiency and product quality.
Every person at Guardian Chemicals is responsible for delivering incomparable innovation in each solution. The people building your products and providing your solutions are passionate about their industry and meticulous about their jobs; they understand that dependability is what makes the difference. That obsession is why we’ve become a benchmark for chemical innovation in North America.
We don’t believe in ‘deliver-and-done’. True benefits revolve around the consistency of program execution, which is why we’re there when you need us both for regular servicing and emergency support for life.
Our experts know your industry and will seek to understand the unique challenges of your business. Let’s talk.
Your systems and processes are interconnected. We’ll arrange a site visit to understand the bigger picture.
Frequently Asked Questions About Chemical Solutions for Wood Products Mills
Press release agents, WESP and RTO cleaning chemistry, cleaners and degreasers for equipment and plant, defoamers for process and effluent water, and sanitation chemistry. Mills usually buy these from several suppliers and end up with nobody looking at how the resin system, the press and the emissions equipment interact.
Application before chemistry, most of the time. Under-spray at the edges, nozzle wear, wrong dilution, or a change in resin loading or mat moisture will produce build-up even with the right product. If the resin system changed from UF to PMDI without a release agent change, that is the other common cause.
PMDI bonds aggressively to steel and needs a more robust barrier than UF does. Running UF-grade release agent on a PMDI line produces gradually increasing build-up and cleaning frequency rather than an obvious failure, which is why it often goes unnoticed for months.
Resin, pitch, tar and condensed organics from dryer and press exhaust, bound with fibre and fines. The layer insulates the collection surfaces so field strength drops and collection efficiency falls well before opacity becomes a visible problem.
Trend secondary voltage and current, sparking frequency, opacity margin and differential pressure against the numbers recorded right after the last clean. On an RTO, watch pressure drop and destruction efficiency. Both degrade gradually enough that crews normalise the drift.
Because neither is well matched to a cured resin deposit. Hot water lacks the chemistry to break it, and caustic at the strength required brings handling, effluent and materials compatibility problems of its own. Purpose-built WESPGUARD chemistry lifts the deposit at conditions the equipment tolerates.
Wood extractives, resin carryover, and surfactants from cleaning chemistry reaching the drain. Foam in a clarifier or aeration basin reduces capacity and can trip level controls, and it is usually controlled at very low dose once the right defoamer is matched to the foam type.
Yes. Release agent carryover onto the panel face interferes with sanding, laminating, painting and overlay adhesion. When a customer reports a finishing problem, the release agent and its application rate belong on the list of things to check.
Yes. We scope the trial with your team, set the measures before it starts, normally build-up rate, applied rate per square metre, panel surface quality and cleaning frequency, and run against your incumbent so the comparison produces data instead of an impression.
Yes. Through our BrightShield process we scope the cleaning work in advance, screen chemistry against your actual deposit in the lab, support the application during the outage, and issue a validation report afterward. Shutdown windows are short enough that the scoping has to happen beforehand.
When you have the right chemistry and support you can count on, you’ll be ready to leave your mark.
