A new market for wood

Historically, composite wood panel manufacturers in North America haven’t used recycled wood, but that’s starting to change.

In 2020, TimberPak opened its 20th facility but its first in North America, says Adam Ricci, U.S. head of wood purchasing for Egger Group, an Austria-based family-owned company that produces composite wood panels.

“TimberPak is part of Egger’s vertical integration strategy,” he says. “TimberPak is a company that is a subsidiary of Egger that collects and preprocesses recycled wood.”

This year, Egger opened a $40 million recycling line at its single U.S. location in Lexington, North Carolina.

“The particleboard plant that is in Lexington started production in 2020,” Ricci says. “We added the recycle line this year in the spring. And then our subsidiary company, TimberPak, has its collection site in Charlotte, which started [operations] in January. And we’re currently developing another [TimberPak] site in the Raleigh area.

“In Charlotte, we use a material handler and wheel loaders to move material and a slow-speed shredder to process the material,” he adds.

Ricci says Europe is ahead of North America when it comes to using recycled wood in medium-density fiberboard (MDF), particle board and other manufactured wood products.

“In terms of the recycled wood, this is something that I think is very new to the U.S.—in fact, it’s new to North America,” Ricci says. “There are no other particle board manufacturers in North America that use recycled wood.

“It’s not so uncommon in Europe. We have a plant in Italy that uses 100 percent-recycled wood,” he adds.

The dearth of timber in Europe, which he says affects Italy and other areas, contributes to the company’s use of recycled wood overseas.

“They have a lot less availability than we do in the U.S.,” Ricci says regarding timber in Europe. “Using the U.K. as an example, the U.K. is roughly 9 percent forest cover; it’s an island made up of mostly open land.”

In the U.S., he says demand seems to be building for recycled materials, driven by extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation, as well as public sentiment.

“In the U.S., we’ll see more particle board or composite panel manufacturers using recycled wood,” he says, citing sustainability and raw material pricing as factors. “But for right now, we’re pretty much it.”

Ricci says opening the plant in late 2020 was good for Egger.

“All in all, it was good timing to get into the market in the U.S.,” he says. “Obviously, demand was very strong after the pandemic.

Challenges came with that, but, overall, all building-related products demand was really good before, during and after the pandemic.”

Preparing wood for Egger

The good news for construction and demolition (C&D) recyclers is that they do not need to do much extra to provide Egger with feedstock.

“Our requirements for recycled wood are much easier to meet than other end users of recycled wood,” Ricci says. “There are a lot of companies that use recycled wood to make mulch, but they have some pretty high standards to meet in terms of quality. With mulch, if you get little bits of plastic in there, then the mulch customer typically doesn’t want it. Whereas, we can take relatively contaminated wood in terms of foreign objects.”

If small nails and bits of concrete or plastic get through, Ricci says that is not a problem.

“The infeed at the recycling plant has a metal detector, and it’s calibrated to a 1-inch bolt, 5 inches long,” he explains. “Anything smaller than a 1-inch diameter, 5-inch-long bolt will just go into the shredder.”

If the metal is larger than that, the magnet stops the system so the metal can be pulled out.

Ricci says a large amount of plastic could be a problem, “but it would have to be pretty excessive.”

Egger also can use recycled oriented strand board and particle board, he adds, but much of the wood Egger uses comes from used pallets and boxes.

The ideal size of wood is 8 inches long or smaller.

“Any C&D processor with a slow-speed shredder could potentially supply our plant in Lexington,” he says, adding that some sorting would be needed to separate usable wood from other C&D material. “A conventional pick line at a C&D transfer station is going to do a fine job. [We can use] any postconsumer wood with the exception of pressure-treated or creosote-treated wood and MDF.”

Ricci says there is no set amount of wood Egger hopes to receive from outside suppliers, but the company needs about 200,000 tons of wood per year. Egger receives wood deliveries around the clock and issues payments weekly. He estimates about 50 percent of Egger’s wood is from external suppliers.

“We try to source as much material as possible within 100 miles, but there’s always exceptions to that,” Ricci says.

In the long term, he says TimberPak probably will provide Egger with 50 percent to 60 percent of its recycled wood.

“It was never part of our strategy that TimberPak would supply all of our wood,” Ricci says. “We’re always going to have some external suppliers of recycled wood.”

The Lexington facility

One reason preparing recovered wood for Egger is relatively easy for C&D recycling companies supplying the firm is the company’s $40 million investment in the Lexington facility to prepare recycled wood for manufacturing.

Ricci says Egger, which began using recycled wood in 2002, has a continuous improvement mentality. “This recycling plant that we built in Lexington has a lot of new technology, even for Egger.”

Egger’s process

According to Egger, the first step in producing the company’s particle board is drying the wood chips. Wood chips travel on a conveyor belt past a magnet, which removes ferrous metal. In the dryer, air reaches nearly 900 F, removing virtually all the moisture.

The steam produced by the drying process passes through a wet electrostatic precipitator that includes a high-voltage electrical field, which charges the particulate matter that is then attracted to collector plates with an opposite charge, removing it from the air and steam.

After that, the steam moves through a regenerative thermal oxidizer, which destroys any remaining volatile organic compounds. By the end of the process, according to Egger, the steam it emits is 99.99 percent free of toxins and pollutants.

The next step in processing the wood is sizing it down, Ricci says.

“The chips and the sawdust are either screened or flaked down to smaller pieces,” he explains. “They go through a screening [and] sifting process that ... sorts them out into core and surface layers.”

The core layer includes the larger, flaky materials, and the surface layer includes the fines, he says.

Material that is too fine to be used in production powers the drum dryers, according to Egger.

Ricci says the dried and sorted wood is combined with urea formaldehyde and urea melamine formaldehyde resins and sent through the ContiRoll, a 143-foot-long press that runs continually. It can produce board that is up to 10 feet wide.

“It uses two steel belts with thousands of rollers,” Ricci says of the ContiRoll. “Using heat and pressure, it compresses this three-layer mat into a board.”

A thermal oil heated to 400 C is used in the process. “It’s actually above the combustion point of the oil, but because it’s in an anaerobic environment, it doesn’t combust.”

After the board has cooled and cured, Ricci says, it’s cut down. The boards then go through a quality control process that tests for internal bonding, surface strength and bending strength, among numerous other attributes.

If boards do not meet Egger’s standards, they are used as cover packaging, reprocessed to make new boards or used to fuel Egger’s wood plant.

Following quality control, surface laminate layers are applied with heat and pressure, Egger says.

The Lexington plant is among Egger’s most sophisticated, Ricci adds. The company has plants in Poland and the United Kingdom that feature similar technology. Groupwide, Ricci says, Egger uses about 2 million tons of postconsumer wood, which is about 23 percent of the company’s total wood use.

“[In the United Kingdom] they’re using 60 percent recycled wood,” he says. “We have this groupwide goal to use 40 percent recycled wood by 2030. It’s a fairly ambitious goal, but that’s for the whole worldwide operation.”

For additional information about Egger’s recovered wood purchasing, C&D recyclers can email woodpurchasing.us@egger.com or visit the company’s website at www.egger.com.

The author is managing editor of Construction & Demolition Recycling and can be reached at bgaetjens@gie.net.