More than 60% of Australian timber ends up in landfills, with the balance burnt as fuel. However, that could change thanks to researchers looking to turn millions of tonnes of treated timbers and engineered wood offcuts into reused, repaired, reprocessed and recycled timber products.
That is according to Dr Pene Mitchell, the project lead for the Australian Timber Circularity Project – covered by Wood Central last year – who, with Dr Martin Strandgard, Dr Melanie Harris (from the University of the Sunshine Coast) and Professor Tripti Singh (head of the National Centre for Timber Durability and Design Life) has worked with Karen Hansen to develop Australia’s first resource map to track timber waste and offcuts.
Launched last week, “the map identifies locations, types and amounts of unused timber resources, as well as solutions that can be integrated into a circular economy strategy,” the researchers said. “The geospatial map will be a powerful tool to repurpose timber waste into valuable resources, reduce waste disposal costs, lower environmental impact, and drive progress toward achieving Australia’s circular economy objectives.”
Dr Mitchell said the map links resources and solutions – identifying timber resources, solution providers, and infrastructure – to resources by volumes, types and treatments: “Examples include CCA-treated timber posts (which) can be reused as agricultural fence products and frame and truss offcuts, (which) can be recycled into glulam,” Dr Strandgard said.
“The (Australian) wine industry removes 3.4 million broken posts each year (about 30,000 tonnes of timber) that either end in costly landfill or stockpiled on vineyards,” Dr Standgard said. “We surveyed that there are 27 million posts stockpiled on vineyards Australia-wide.”
Instead, Dr Standgard is pushing for “repost-style” reuse of broken posts: “There is an NZ-based business that already does this—they collect the posts, reuse them, and sell them through hardware stores.” And there is no reason why this model could not work in South Australia—a region where five regions account for 60% of post-removals every year. “We can use the map to divide the resource by region, including Murray Bridge.”
Recycling truss and frame offcuts into glulam beams.
“This is already happening with Megabeam in Queensland,” said Dr Stangard. “They collect frame and truss offcuts as ‘backloads’ – recovering offcuts in delivering beams for manufacturers – with the frame and truss offcuts then used in up to 10% of their new glulam beams.”
“This is a win-win” for Megabeam—who receive the timber for free (less transport costs)—and the manufacturers, who do not need to dispose of the offcuts. “Megabeam wants to increase the amount of offcuts they use in their beams, so using the resource map, we can identify frame and truss manufacturers within a 100km radius of its Caloundra base.”
- To learn more about the Australian Timber Circularity Project, including the role of CCA-treated timber in the circular economy, click here for Wood Central’s special feature.
