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2026-04-09/Drew Hanover
Schilliger Holz Starts Up Lignatherm: A Milestone for Swiss Wood
Schilliger Holz Starts Up Lignatherm: A Milestone for Swiss Wood
When we first spoke with Schilliger Holz AG, they were already thinking about fire risk differently than most wood processors.
They became AVIAN's first customer. Now, years later, they're installing our cameras in their brand new Lignatherm facility in Küssnacht. Watching this company grow has given us a front-row seat to what vertical integration in the wood industry can actually look like.
What Is Lignatherm?
Lignatherm is a new subsidiary of Schilliger Holz AG, started to fill a real gap in the Swiss wood processing chain. When Pavatex shut down its Swiss insulating board plants in 2014 and 2019, Switzerland had no domestic production of wood fiber insulation boards. Schilliger stepped in to change that.
The new facility in the Fänn industrial area of Küssnacht am Rigi covers 6,000 m². It features a production hall rising 20 meters and a high-bay warehouse at nearly 40 meters. Annual capacity is up to 50,000 tons of wood chips processed into fiber insulation boards. The investment is over CHF 100 million.
The energy plant, supplied by Dieffenbacher Energy (formerly Bertsch Energy), was commissioned in December 2025. The facility entered gradual startup in April 2026.
The Supply Chain Story
Here's what makes this facility remarkable. The raw material for Lignatherm boards is wood chips. Wood chips are a byproduct of sawmill operations. And two of Schilliger's sawmills, Haltikon and Perlen, sit right next door.
That means wood enters the sawmill, gets cut into dimensional lumber, and the leftover chips walk (practically) across the street to become insulation boards. No expensive raw material procurement. Short transport distances. Cascading use of every part of the log.
From their website: "Our raw material, our product. Wood chips, a byproduct of our sawmills, are the input for Lignatherm. No costly raw material procurement, and transportation distances stay short."
This is textbook vertical integration. But it is also something rarer: a company that genuinely thought about what to do with what was already in its hands.
A Full Product Family Under One Roof
Schilliger doesn't just run sawmills. Their product line spans the full timber construction spectrum:
- Sawmills in Haltikon, Perlen, and Volgelsheim, France (300,000 m³/year in Volgelsheim alone)
- CLT and large-format panels (Grossformatplatten) for mass timber construction
- Glulam for structural beams and columns
- CL-Therm: a globally unique combination panel that integrates CLT with wood fiber insulation in a single element. Used in schools, hospitals, collective housing, and even the journalist village at the Olympic Games
- Lignatherm: wood fiber insulation boards for roofs, facades, and interiors, made entirely from Swiss wood
All of that from a company founded in 1861 by Blasius Schilliger, now in its fifth generation. All sourcing roundwood exclusively from Swiss forests.
The New Applications That Become Possible
CLT by itself is structural. Add insulation as a separate layer and you have more complexity, more labor, and more joints. CL-Therm eliminates that. One element handles both load and thermal performance. Buildings that used to require a concrete contractor are now being done entirely in timber.
The Lignatherm boards fit on the same spectrum. A building envelope sourced from a single supply chain, all Swiss wood, all traceable, all recyclable. From a circular economy perspective, it is hard to beat.
Switzerland had no domestic insulation board production for over a decade. Now it does. That matters for local contractors who want to specify Swiss wood products and for architects pushing for lower-embodied carbon buildings.
Why Fire Safety Matters More at Scale
Running a facility like Lignatherm isn't the same as running a sawmill. You are dealing with a large dryer, significant dust generation, and a building full of highly combustible material. The fire risk profile is different from raw timber production.
Schilliger already knows this well. In January 2017, a dust explosion in the filter system and silo area at the Haltikon sawmill destroyed two production halls and caused 15 to 20 million francs in damage. About 300 firefighters fought the blaze for nearly 100 hours.
That kind of experience changes how a company thinks about monitoring. When Schilliger came to us, they were not looking for a checkbox. They wanted eyes on their process, around the clock.
That's why AVIAN cameras are going into Lignatherm.
The new facility uses dry-process technology with pressurized refining systems supplied by ANDRITZ. The process generates significant heat and fine wood fiber dust. AVIAN thermal cameras will monitor critical points across the facility, providing continuous surveillance and early warning before a temperature anomaly becomes a fire.
A Relationship Built on Trust
We don't take lightly the fact that Schilliger was our first customer. They took a chance on technology that was new. They gave us real-world conditions, real feedback, and pushed us to think harder about what industrial thermal monitoring should do.
Seeing them build a CHF 100 million facility, and choosing to install our cameras from day one, is meaningful to us.
The new Lignatherm plant is coming online in phases through 2026. As it ramps up to 24-hour operations, the monitoring stakes get higher. We're proud to be part of how they're approaching that.
If you run a processing facility and want to understand how thermal monitoring applies to your operation, reach out to our team. We're happy to walk through what it looks like in practice.
Drew Hanover
CTO & Co-Founder
