Leveraging the green economy: recovering contaminated wood as pallet blocks

Abstract

The market for clean wood has been growing in the last years; however, waste wood hasn’t been considered a resource mainly because it usually arises as part of a mixed waste stream and it is predominantly contaminated, which often makes recovery impractical. Large quantities of waste wood are being discarded to landfill every year, which represent a significant missed opportunity. The CleanWood LIFE project is offering an innovative solution to wood recovery and identifies uses for all co-products. This paper presents the successful vision separation technology the project has developed to detect and isolate contaminated woodchip. All residues from the process are used: clean wood as boiler fuel for the CHP system, the remaining contaminated wood for the manufacturing of composite pallet blocks, ferrous/non-ferrous materials, stone, glass and plastics for recycling.