Pulping of waste wood

In the time when the awareness of the biomass as a limited resource drives the efforts to increase resource efficiency (in the forest industry in particular), waste construction wood is mainly incinerated. Even though it contains attractive bio-building blocks that could be converted into a number of high-value products.

To access these building blocks the waste wood needs to be subjected to pulping and thus introduced into raw material streams to pulp mills.

Yet, the pulping behavior of this wood is completely unknown and will be addressed in this project gathering competences and perspectives from academic research (Chalmers), pulping industry (Södra) and material recycling (Ragn-Sells).

Special focus will be on identifying deviations from the pulping behavior of virgin wood, such as cooking chemical demand, pulping kinetics and properties of the obtained pulp and lignin. In light of that, requirements on the existing processes and future process design in the mills will be analysed.