Recycling and Reuse of Timber

Both nationally and internationally, the use of waste wood is still at a very low level and takes place almost exclusively in chipboard production. SP5 aims to (a) significantly increase the reuse and recycling rate of wood, and (b) achieve higher added value through the use of waste wood in solid wood products. To achieve these goals, three parallel development strands are being pursued:

• While analytics now allow a high degree of selectivity in plastics sorting, there is still a considerable backlog for waste wood. As part of the planned project, the prerequisites for higher detection accuracy will be created and tested in an industrial environment.
• Logistics and trade routes are a decisive factor in closing the material cycles of wood products. They are to be comprehensively evaluated while deriving optimization concepts.
• The project distinguishes between three fields of action for wood processing and further processing into secondary building materials: (1) reuse of beams and solid wood panels; (2) production of solid wood panels from standardized small-scale waste wood elements; (3) use of waste wood in chipboard production. For (1) and (2), the aim is automated industrial processing of the solid wood fractions from the waste wood stream into standardized solid wood elements before these are further processed into commercially available construction products (as opposed to products with a waste wood look).