How Shellac Is Made: From Lac Insect to Export Container

It starts with an insect, not a tree

Shellac is secreted by Kerria lacca, a scale insect that feeds on the sap of certain host trees. As it feeds it lays down a hard resin over its own body until the twig is coated in a continuous crust. That crust is the raw material behind every grade we sell.

Three host trees carry almost all commercial cultivation:

• Kusum (Schleichera oleosa) — yields the pale, higher-value lac the trade calls Kusmi.
• Palas (Butea monosperma) — the main Rangeeni host, giving a darker, more orange resin.
• Ber (Ziziphus mauritiana) — also Rangeeni, widely grown on field boundaries and homestead land.

The producing region is the Jharkhand lac belt and adjoining districts of Chhattisgarh, Odisha and West Bengal. This is worth stating plainly because it is reported loosely almost everywhere: Jharkhand, not Bihar, is the primary lac-producing state. We buy raw material from collectors across that belt and move it to our processing facility at Nawada in Bihar.

Cultivation is not plantation agriculture. Lac is grown by tens of thousands of smallholders who inoculate their own trees with brood lac and scrape the crop by hand. Supply responds to weather, forest access and labour availability rather than to a factory schedule — which is why lead times in this trade are quoted against crop calendars.

Two strains, four crops a year

The lac insect runs on two distinct strains, each producing two crops annually. Which crop your material came from explains most of the variation you will see in colour and yield.

Most export enquiries resolve to two grades: Kusmi seedlac where colour is the priority, and Baisakhi seedlac where volume and price are. We supply both, and we will tell you which crop a lot came from rather than describing everything as one generic grade.

Step one: scraping sticklac

At harvest the encrusted twigs are cut and the resin scraped off. The result is sticklac — coarse, dark and granular, still carrying twig fragments, insect bodies and water-soluble lac dye.

Sticklac is the crudest tradeable form and is rarely exported as such. It carries a high proportion of non-resin matter, and the plant residue complicates plant-health clearance at destination.

Step two: washing into seedlac

Sticklac is washed repeatedly to remove dye, soil and debris, then sieved and dried in the shade. What emerges is seedlac: small free-flowing grains running from pale lemon to deep orange-brown depending on the crop.

Yield falls sharply here — roughly two-thirds of the sticklac weight survives as seedlac, the balance being dye, wax, twig and moisture. The wash water is not discarded on a well-run unit: it carries the lac dye (laccaic acids), which can be recovered and dried.

Seedlac is a finished export product in its own right and our single largest line. Many buyers prefer it because it lets them do their own melting and filtration to their own colour standard.

Step three: melting and filtration

To become shellac, seedlac must be melted and filtered so that wax, dirt and insolubles separate from the resin. Three routes exist, and they produce genuinely different products.

Bhatta, the hand-made route. The traditional method, and the one used at Nawada. Seedlac is packed into a long cloth tube held over a charcoal fire. As the resin softens the tube is twisted, squeezing molten shellac through the weave and leaving wax and dirt behind in the cloth. What happens next decides the form: stretched thin across a warm surface and broken up, it becomes shellac flakes; dropped onto a flat surface to spread into discs of roughly 25–30 mm, it becomes button lac — the form sold to Bangladeshi buyers as gala, and our highest-volume finished line into that market.

Machine-made. The same separation done with heated hydraulic presses or steam. Output is more consistent batch to batch, throughput is higher, and the resin sees a shorter, better-controlled heat history.

Solvent process. Here seedlac is dissolved in ethanol rather than melted, the solution filtered or centrifuged to remove wax, and the solvent recovered. This is the only route to dewaxed shellac, and the starting point for bleached shellac, where the alkaline resin solution is treated with sodium hypochlorite to strip colour.

An honest note on scope: solvent processing is not done at Nawada — it needs a dedicated ethanol-handling plant. Dewaxed and bleached grades are produced for us by established specialist processors in the Purulia–Kolkata belt, tested to the same standard and shipped under our documentation. We would rather say so than imply a capability we do not have on site.

One related point that causes constant confusion in enquiries: dewaxed is not a form, and flakes are not a composition. Wax content and physical shape are independent attributes. You can have waxy flakes and dewaxed flakes; the two words answer different questions.

What comes off to the side

Two by-products have their own markets rather than being waste. Lac wax is recovered from the filtration residue — a hard natural wax with a high melting point, used in polishes, carbon paper and cosmetics. Lac dye is recovered from the sticklac wash water.

Lac dye deserves one clarification, because it is misstated almost everywhere: it is not the same substance as E120. E120 is carminic acid from the cochineal insect — a different molecule from a different species. Lac dye holds food-additive approval in Japan, Korea and China; it has no EU E-number.

Testing before anything ships

Every consignment we send carries a certificate of analysis from a NABL-accredited laboratory. Routine parameters — colour, wax content, moisture, insolubles — are run per batch. The full heavy-metals panel is run periodically rather than per batch, because those values are stable across lots drawn from the same sourcing region, and a heavy-metals result is only meaningful if the lab work behind it is properly accredited.

If you want to know what each document in that set actually covers, and what to check before your material reaches customs, we have written that up separately in our guide to COA, MSDS and TDS.

Packing and loading

Seedlac and finished shellac are packed in food-grade liners inside multi-wall paper sacks or corrugated cartons, in 25 kg units unless your specification says otherwise, then palletised and wrapped. Shellac is a thermoplastic resin: it will block and fuse into a solid mass if stored hot, so stuffing and stowage matter more here than for most dry cargo.

From Nawada, cargo moves two ways. Sea freight goes FOB Kolkata. Bangladesh shipments generally move overland on FCA or DAP terms via the Petrapole–Benapole border, which is faster and usually cheaper than a port call on that lane. For Vietnam we issue a Form AI certificate of origin under the ASEAN–India FTA so the duty reduction is available to you at clearance. Our Incoterms guide works through what each term means for your landed cost.

Why the process is worth knowing

Almost every quality question we are asked traces back to one of these steps. Colour comes from the crop and the host tree. Wax content comes from whether the material was pressed or dissolved. Batch-to-batch consistency comes from whether melting was hand-controlled or machine-controlled. Heat history — how long the resin sat molten — determines how the material behaves under your own processing later.

A supplier who can tell you which crop, which route and which lot is a supplier who can reproduce a result. That is the basis on which we ask for your business.