Recycled wood is becoming more and more important material source for production of new materials and chemicals. For good quality of end products predominately clean recycled wood should be used. In present research, we have focus on concentrations of non-wooden materials in recycled wood and presence of inorganic pollutants: chlorine (Cl), chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), lead (Pb), iron (Fe) and bromine (Br). Sampling of different qualities of commercially available recycled wood was performed for one year in recycling companies from Germany, Slovenia, Finland and UK. Beside above mentioned long term monitoring, one for one batch fraction analysis was made as well. For nine different fractions soluble part and lignin content were determine also. Results showed that AI recycled wood (German classification), had low share of non-wooden materials and only few samples exceeds limit values for inorganic pollutants. On the other hand in AI-AIII mix recycled wood contains significantly higher portion of non-wooden material (up to 3 %). This mixtures had also higher concentrations of inorganic pollutants. More than 85% of samples, for at least one of the monitored chemicals, exceed limit concentration prescribed by German ordinance for recovered wood. Concentration of chemical elements in samples from nine different size fraction negatively correlates with particle size in the fractions. The same was observed also for soluble part and lignin content. In general we can conclude that recycled wood from big companies whit sophisticated sorting system contains less non-wooden material, and can provide rather clean AI wood. On the other hand AI-AIII mix recycled wood contained rather high concentrations of inorganic elements regardless the origin or sorting system.

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