A barrier to recycling wood products is impregnation chemicals, adhesives, or other forms of contamination in the wood. Stergios Adamopoulos at SLU has received a large grant from the EU to develop methods for sorting, cleaning, and reusing wood waste on a large scale.
"Instead of contaminated wood becoming waste or being burned, we want the material to be reused more efficiently, while simultaneously producing less waste," says Stergios Adamopoulos, Professor of Wood Science and Technology at SLU.
A fundamental part of the bioeconomy is allowing materials to circulate. The more efficiently materials can be reused and circulated in the system, the fewer trees need to be used to replace fossil materials. While recycling plastics and metals has been ongoing for a long time, the recycling of contaminated wood has not occurred to the same extent.
"Materials from the forest can play an important role, but they are not available in unlimited amounts. So, if we can recycle and create useful secondary materials, resources will last longer. On top of that, we get healthier and more environmentally friendly products," says Stergios Adamopoulos.
This research is made possible since SLU, with support from the Kempestiftelsen foundation, invested in a unique spectroscopic analysis instrument that can scan large volumes of material and measure both inorganic substances, such as metals, and organic substances based on hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. Demolition wood, for example, can contain a wide variety of chemical materials. One goal of the research is to find methods to identify and ensure the quality of various forms of wood waste. Ultimately, the aim is to develop methods to depollute and reuse the wood. The WoodTreat project will run from 2025 to 2029.
Stergios Adamopoulos has also received funding for an EU project aimed at developing bio-based coatings, such as those used in construction materials or the shiny plastic surface inside a beverage carton. This is material that Swedish industry manufactures in large quantities and is currently fossil-based. The BLUECOAT project will run from 2025 to 2029. Both projects are funded under the Circular Bio Based Europe initiative and total 7 million Euro.
These projects help establish SLU as a world leader in the research of biomaterials, which is a cornerstone of a developed bioeconomy.
Currently, Stergios Adamopoulos leads the Vinnova-funded BioGlue Competence Center (2023-2028), which develops bio-based adhesives, in collaboration with among others IKEA. He also leads the EU project EcoReFibre (2022-2026), which develops methods to recycle fibreboard that have no commercially viable recycling methods at the moment.