FEATURES- ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY
Environmental benefits aside, recycling timber can also be profitable. And, in this ever volatile economy of ours, an additional source of income is welcome.
WASTE NOT, WANT NOT
Tons of waste wood and timber is disposed of every year. Recycling this wood is highly beneficial, especially since timber can be reused without felling more trees. Not only that, but the improper disposal of timber be hazardous to the environment.
The timber recycling process is fairly simple. Waste wood and timber can be sent to recycling plants for processing. The pieces are loaded into a powerful wood shredder, which breaks them up in varying size of wood chips. Different sizes are then used for different purposes. The oversized pieces are re-circulated and the fine material is used as animal bedding. The process is efficient in ensuring that the products are not wasted. In the absence of a recycling plant, waste wood and timber is simply relegated to a landfill or dump. Recycling and reusing construction timber is not common practise in South Africa yet. Very often, the only people who reuse and recycle timber and wood are artisans who use it to make furniture and other household items.
In the UK, however, using recycled wood has become quite a trend in the past two decades. In an article –‘ The Opportunities and Challenges for Re-use and Recycling of Timber and Wood Products Within the Construction Sector’ – by Graham A Ormondroyd, Morwenna J Spear and Campbell Skinner, published in Environmental Impacts of Traditional and Innovative Forest-based Bio-products in 2016, the authors explain that a number of factors have influenced this growing trend. Those factors include early adoption of standards for the quality of recycled wood in the particleboard industry, clear segregation of waste wood by origin and level of expected contamination and, more recently, the development of the biomass energy market.
“ The construction sector [ in the UK ] presents several challenges when reclaiming, re-using or recycling timber, however, significant progress has been made
" The construction sector presents several challenges when reclaiming, re-using or recycling timber."
by the introduced legislation, and through initiatives, best practice and the development of waste transfer stations and businesses utilising waste wood.” One way that timber is repurposed in South Africa is as medium-density fibreboard( MDF). MDF, which is typically made up of wood fibre, urea-formaldehyde resin glue, water and paraffin wax, is quite common in South Africa. MDF is created by putting layer upon layer of compressed wood chips together, to create the thickness required. And, while MDF is not recycled timber in the strictest sense, it is a good example of how wood that would otherwise be discarded has been repurposed into a useful and financially-viable product.
CHALLENGES TO OVERCOME
One of the biggest problems with recycling timber is that the collected wood comes from multiple sources. Construction sites especially are, and can be, major contributors of timber. Unfortunately, this wood is usually a mixture of every variety available. Pieces of solid wood will be mixed in with laminate material, plywood and even treated timber. This poses a big challenge when it comes to recycling because the material must be sorted and separated. It is a labour-intensive process that is also timeconsuming.
In South Africa, however, there is an abundance of unskilled labour and, perhaps, timber recycling plants could help to alleviate this.
Timber reclaimed and recycled from demolition is a viable and environmentally-efficient commodity that can be reused structurally and as processed into other forms. The challenges for the industry in South Africa is to make effective use of this untapped resource.
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