Reuse of scrap wood

Reuse of scrap wood: in a building product

Mantje, Meike (TU Delft Architecture and the Built Environment)

Bergsma, A.C. (mentor)
Gommans, L.J.J.H.M. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences | Building Technology | Sustainable Design

2023-10-31

Climate is changing. The average temperature on earth is rising due to excessive emissions of greenhouse gasses such as CO2. In the meantime the economy is a linear economy where a produced from exhaustive materials are consumed and turned into waste. In order to fight climate change and exhaust the earth less the greenhouse gas emissions need to decrease and less waste needs to be produced. The government has set goals to have a circular economy by 2050. A circular economy means the elimination of waste, instead all materials are reused and recycled to its final potential and new materials come from renewable sources.
One commonly used renewable material in the built in environment is wood. Besides, wood sequesters CO2, has a low environmental impact and can be reused and recycled. When more wood is used and forests keep growing, more CO2 is sequestered, especially when it is substituted for product that emit a lot of CO2. Wood can so contribute to the overall decrease in CO2 emissions.
But at the moment there is also a huge waste production of wood, with a annually production of 1,8 Mton waste wood, of which 435 kton is scrap wood (waste wood from the construction and demolition industry) (Sloopcheck, 2021). Most is incinerated or otherwise recycled. Only a small portion is reused. In order to contribute to the circular economy goals scrap wood should therefore be reused and recycled. This thesis aims to research why the portion of reusing scrap wood is so small and tries to find a suitable building product to show that scrap wood can and should be reused. The suitable building product is CLT, due to the used lamellae consisting of varying dimensions, mechanical properties and possibly wood species. This research shows that scrap wood can be implemented into scrap wood, although the portion of scrap wood into a panel depends on the availability of certain required properties. The substitution of scrap wood in CLT panels always results in extra CO2 savings, and therefore the reuse of scrap wood into CLT panels can contribute to reducing CO2 emissions.

scrap wood
reuse
sustainability
carbon emissions
CLT
Remanufacturing

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Student theses

master thesis

© 2023 Meike Mantje