When construction is completed in fall of 2020, CalPlant will be the world’s first commercial-scale producer of rice straw-based medium density fiberboard (MDF), annually supplying approximately 140 million square feet of no-added-formaldehyde MDF to the building products industry.
CalPlant and its predecessor company CalAg have spent many years researching, developing and patenting a process to make high quality MDF using annually renewable rice straw as the feedstock, the disposal of which has posed environmental issues in California for over a century. Rice straw is an agricultural waste product of the annual harvest, and all furnish for the plant will be procured from Sacramento Valley rice growers within a 25-mile radius of the plant site in Willows, California.