Australians are excellent consumers of products. These products ultimately end up as waste materials and need to go somewhere. Australia produces around 28 million tons of waste per year with around 50% currently ending up in landfill, including a significant amount of timber, engineered wood products (EWP’s), and preservative treated wood (PTW). Limited landfill capacity, increasing costs, and changes in public perceptions have encouraged development of robust re-use and recycling systems for paper, metals, and plastic, forming part of an increasing interest in circular economy approaches. Timber has amazing structural properties with strong environmental attributes being renewable and recyclable, but traditionally has limited and low-value end-of life options, especially for EWP’s/PTW’s. Recent commercial initiatives have highlighted the potential for collection, recovery, processing, re-use and recycling of some limited timber and EWP waste into wood products like particleboard, however challenges such as waste contamination, inconsistent regulation, processing of certain waste types, and Australia’s isolated cities and rural manufacturing regions remain in need of further investigation in the context of circular economy. EWPAA is an industry partner in a Forest and Wood Products Association (FWPA) and industry funded, large-scale R&D project to be conducted by the National Centre for Timber Durability and Design Life (NDC). The project will engage with timber product and EWP manufacturers, timber importers, the vineyard industry, frame and truss plants, as well as adhesive and preservative suppliers to address this issue. The project team will consolidate estimates of volumes of EWP’s and PTW’s in the disposal stream and their location, assess residual preservative/resin issues related to transport to re-processing sites, develop transport models to optimise economic collection, deliver a demonstration take-back program, and assess the feasibility of various reuse/recycle pathways, including resawing, composite panel production, combustion, and composting for each material – pathways that are in use around the world. This project will help solve disposal issues, convert waste to products, create new products, and support employment and industry growth.

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