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2. UK Waste Wood Markets The latest Wood Recyclers Association (WRA) statistics for 2023 show that, of the 4.5 million tonnes of waste wood handled, 4.408 million tonnes were processed and used in the UK [15]. In terms of destinations, large-scale biomass energy plants used 63% of the wood processed, i.e., 2.73 million tonnes. Panel products took 22% of the recycled wood, i.e., 963 thousand tonnes. This is a decrease compared to 2022, partially related to the closure of one particleboard factory. A further 8% went into animal bedding, i.e., 350,000 tonnes. In addition, 5% of the recycled wood was exported, due to demand for bioenergy in Europe. The increased share of recycled wood going into bioenergy between the first decade of the century and current is dramatic. For example, in 2007 panel products were 60% of the market supplied, and biomass and energy only 12.6%. At the time the total handled was lower, just under 2 million tonnes [14]. By 2009, 566 thousand tonnes of the total 2.2 million tonnes of waste wood went into bioenergy [13], i.e., the quantity had doubled in two years. The current 63% of recycled wood entering bioenergy is a reversal of fortune, reflecting a strong shift in the market. Ormondroyd et al. [27] noted that the municipal wood waste gathered from Wales and from the highly active recycling regions of England were located close to existing wood- based panel manufacturers, indicating the connection between market pull and waste infrastructure. Good wood waste collection provides an easy route to the next generation of wood products. By 2023, the utilisation of waste wood has reached a higher level of competition with a complex web of transactions between local authorities, waste handling companies, and panel mills or biomass energy producers, meaning that this geographical trend is less evident. Nguyen et al. [28] pointed out that, in Europe, the energy utilisation of waste wood tends to exceed materials uses such as wood-based panels, with some countries having 85–95% of waste wood enter energy applications (e.g., Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, and Finland). This is now increasingly the case in the UK. Landfill ceased to be the default option for waste wood in the UK during the 2010s, when a sequence of increases in landfill tax were implemented [13,29]. The quantity of wood entering landfill decreased dramatically. Current UK waste statistics report wood as 0% of landfill intake materials, which can be interpreted as a negligible or undetectable quantity [30]. The most likely remaining reason for wood entering landfill is the very small quantities that are too intimately mixed with other wastes for segregation, for example, as a small component within an electrical appliance or household object. Other traces of wood waste may occur in the household waste stream where the quantities are perceived by the consumer to be too small to justify a trip to the household waste recycling centre. But, it should be noted that the use of landfill itself has diminished in the UK, as the incineration of household waste with energy recovery has become a common approach for the non-recyclable fraction of the waste stream in many regions.
3. Wood Collection, Segregation, and Processing Routes 3.1. Waste Sorting
In order to segregate and process wood waste more efficiently and optimise the split into appropriate grades, there has been an increase in the number of hubs across the UK handling, sorting, or storing wood waste. This was prompted by work by WRAP and the WRA in the 2010s that highlighted the need for increased collection facilities and a consistent set of criteria to ensure best use of the range of qualities of material [31,32]. The result was a widely adopted set of grades, from A to D, as shown in Table 1.
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