Andreas Krause
University Hamburg, Germany
Title: Extending the life cycle – Novel wood-plastic composites as potential applications for post-consumer wood and plastics
Biography
Biography: Andreas Krause
Abstract
Plastics from packaging are of major important in residual waste, which are either energetical recovered or landfilled. Only a small amount is recycled to secondary materials due to the high efforts for sorting and a lack in market of value added products for the recycled plastics. In the first decade of the 21st century, rising prices of crude oil has led to rising prices of plastic from hydrocarbon sources which has in turn affected the demand and rising prices for wooden fuel. In Germany, about 50% of the harvested wood is directly used as a renewable energy carrier. Studies estimated, that in the next 15 years wooden resources will become scarce in Europe due its heterogenous usability as an energy carrier, as a durable building product and as a precursor for the chemical industry by promoting wood as the sustainable key resource in the European Bioeconomy Strategy. Innovation in biomaterials has led to an increasing demand for wood-plastic composites (WPC), which combine the technical advantages of wood and thermoplastics by miniziming the disadvantages of the neat resources. Rescent developments of new thermoplastic biobased recyced materials will be shown. Using secondary resources for WPC exhibited equal stiffness, strength and physical performance compared to virgin resources, what is also beneficial from an ecological point of view by applying the product LCA methodology. An environmental basket of products study assessed the preferable end-of-life alternative of WPC. Recycling of post-consumer WPC tend to be the preferable alternative. Up to now, the least preferable options, incineration and landfilling, are the dominant disposal routes.
