Waste2Wood

Wood is a valuable, renewable and sustainable material with excellent functional properties and the potential to replace fossil materials in lightweight and composite materials. Wood processing generates large amounts of waste such as offcuts, chips and sawdust. Like all other products, wood products eventually reach the end of their life cycle and are disposed of as waste. The global use of wood has increased significantly in recent years, resulting in more and more wood waste.

An improvement of the material cycle in the context of the circular economy for wood materials is desirable, since currently about 79% of wood waste is still incinerated and about 5% is landfilled. Existing recycling processes for waste wood require the use of harmful chemicals and binders. Research in this project is now taking an innovative approach to producing wood-based materials from wood waste using sustainable technology.

The goal is to develop environmentally friendly chemical and biotechnological processes to modify the biopolymer matrix of wood waste to enable further processing into semi-structural composites without additional binders.

An immediate application is the use of the material as a new component in cross-laminated timber with multi-material design to reduce volume by 40%. Initial results show that a highly anisotropic material can be produced with mechanical properties comparable to or better than natural wood and WPCs. New approaches are also pursuing in situ de/repolymerization of lignin as a binder to achieve even better mechanical and physical potentials for further technical applications.