North Wales-based Kronospan said yesterday that as much as 80% of its board could be made from recycled wood, provided the quality improved.
– Richard Coulson, Kronospan
However, the company at Chirk, near Wrexham, said that a higher price for wood PRNs was needed to encourage uptake of recycled material.
Richard Coulson, sawmill residues and recycled materials buyer for Kronospan, said:
“At the moment we use about 60% recycled fibre in chipboard. We have got massive potential for growth up to the eighties.”
Kronospan uses 350,000 tonnes of recycled wood a year, which is a quarter of all wood used at Chirk. However, the company fell below this target in Spring, due to a lack of industry-standard material.
Quality
Mr Coulson said: “We can't accept treated timber and we need a 10-50mm chip. We have to reject material that is not the right quality to meet our environmental targets.”
Kronospan spends three million pounds a year de-contaminating recycled wood, at its special plant at Chirk. The plant extracts metal, grit, paper and plastic before the wood is sheathed in sawdust and compressed into chipboard.
Mr Coulson explained that cleaner material would save time and environmental impact. He said: “We can turn up the speed of our plant if wood recyclers provide cleaner material.”
Value
Kronospan said that recycled material was an acceptable alternative to sawmill residues for chipboard production because of the reduced moisture content together with the revenue provided from packaging waste recovery notes, making the materials use a realistic commercial proposition.
However, the manufacturer explained that the current value of PRNs, at around 4.50 a tonne, needed to increase to make recycling more viable.
Gavin Adkins, Kronospan's head of timber buying, said: “The PRN drop is a huge dent in the benefits of using recycled fibre. Nobody knows what's going to happen in the PRN market from one year to the other.”
Mr Adkins called for the government to increase its 20% target for packaging recovery for wood to help recyclers and reflect the high levels of wood recycling undertaken in the UK. He said: “The success of the industry should be encouraged.”
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