Material efficiency and circular economy

Wood is an important building block on the path to a bioeconomy. And yet sustainable forestry production cannot be increased indefinitely – even though demand for wood is constantly rising.

Our current linear economic model (take – make – waste) requires a high level of resource use because raw materials must be extracted from the environment in order to produce something. Once they have been used, most of these raw materials are incinerated directly as waste or end up in landfill.

Forward-looking approaches envisage circular value creation, in which resources are converted into smart products so efficiently that they create broad added value during use through innovative business models. At the end of their useful life, such multi-component products can be easily separated, with the raw materials remaining in the cycle and ready for reuse.

For the timber sector, the circular economy approach has another advantage: the carbon bound in the tree during growth remains stored in the wood during its use. The longer the wood remains in the material cycle, the longer the carbon is removed from the atmosphere. However, only about 20 percent of waste wood is currently reused as material, primarily in chipboard.

According to the current Waste Wood Ordinance, waste wood classes I and II are permitted for material use. These include single-type waste wood without contaminants, e.g. boards or pallets, and coated wood-based materials. Some coatings fall into waste wood class III and may not be used (see table). However, waste wood is currently collected largely in mixed assortments. Almost half of the waste wood that has already been sorted consists of mixed assortments A I/A II and A I/A II/A III, which may not be used as material in chipboard.