SRS4702 Header Value Added Products from Discarded Wood Pallets and Other Solid Wood


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 Abstract. The potential exists to make high-valued ECO products out of discarded pallet and demolition materials. Products with values much greater than fiber products such as fuel. Many of the 171 million pallets, containing some 2.6 billion board feet, recovered from the waste stream by pallet recyclers and retrievers have parts that could be used in value added products. Pallet recovery operations disassemble many of the recovered pallets to obtain parts to be used to rebuild or make new pallet from used parts. Many of these parts and pallet are routinely reduced to fiber while they have sound boards that could be used for solid wood products.

We have and continue to conduct recovery studies at landfills and other locations. We study the potential to recover pallet parts to make higher valued products such as flooring and paneling. This work has been supported by the development of PROACT - an economic analysis tool. The production of value added products from used pallet parts looks very promising.

Philip A. Araman and Matthew F. Winn

 


Accomplishments

  • Research to convert pallet repair parts to hardwood flooring
  • Research to convert landfill recovery area pallets to parts and then to rustic paneling and furniture materials - nail holes were left in the final products

Current and Future Work

  • Conducting research to convert landfill recovery area thin deckboards to 5/16 inch rustic flooring
  • Research to show that finger jointing could be used to make long flooring and paneling from short pallet part sections
  • Research to convert used home decking and other demolition materials in value added products

Technology Transfer Efforts

  • We are preparing papers on completed research
  • We have made several presentations on the above subjects

 

 

Southern Research Station Forest Service USDA Virginia Tech Department of Wood Science and Forest Products Non-Timber Forest Products
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Last Modified: 06/13/07
Send Comments to Matt Winn: mwinn@fs.fed.us