Upcycling of Single-Use Pallet Wood to Cross-Laminated Timber

Abstract

To reduce the emission of greenhouse gases within the building industry, effort must be put into reducing waste and converting reclaimed materials towards reuse. Within the Netherlands, discarded wood is incinerated for energy generation, releasing the carbon that has been captured during growth. To extend the lifetime and the carbon storage duration and, consequently, improve the environmental performance of “wood waste,” re-use is desired. Hence, the production and structural performance of cross-laminated timber (CLT) made of current wood waste were explored in this study. Single-use pallets were collected and manually disassembled with all fasteners removed. The wood was then finger-jointed, edge-glued, planed, and fabricated into 1.2 × 3 m CLT. In total eight CLT panels were made with different layups, of which three were used in this work. Mechanical testing indicated the potential of the created elements, showing similar performances to new CLT. While the bending tests suffered due to some manufacturing problems, planar shear tests showed good performances, similar to new CLT.