MDF Recovery: Recycled MDF technologies for routed and laminated applications

Medium Density Fibreboard (MDF) is an engineered wood panel product composed of refined virgin wood fibers, mixed with resin and wax and pressed into flat sheets under pressure and at elevated temperature. It is mostly used for furniture production and, like plywood, as a building material. It is often confused with particleboard, but MDF is far easier to handle with industrial machinery and it has a smooth surface that is ideal for applying surface finishes or paint.
Approximately 1 million tons of MDF are used in the UK every year, 13 million tons in Europe and 25 million tons worldwide. The material has been embedded into furniture, shop fittings and joinery products for over 40 years and so extensive volumes of post consumer waste will need to be processed in the coming years. In a report the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) (2009) stated that conservative estimates suggested over 150,000 tons of MDF waste from the UK furniture sector alone were either disposed of in landfill sites or burnt without energy recovery.
MDF recovery and the BioComposties Centre have developed an innovative technology to reprocess medium density fibreboard (MDF). The process now developed consists of a wet phase grading of the waste followed by a mechanical dewatering, flash drying and finally decontamination.
Recent work has shown that panels made with a proportion of rMDF fibre do not exhibit major colour differences from those made with 0% rMDF and therefore the panels will accept lamination without any bleed through of colour. It has also been demonstrated that the MDF can be profiled with a router as well as virgin MDF.