WOOD RECYCLING BY NIR TECHNOLOGY

The recycling of waste wood has become increasingly important during the last few decades. The use of recovered wood varies among the countries and in Italy, the percentage of recovered wood used for particleboard production, reached the 89%. Anyway, to use recycled wood to produce MDF panels or energy we need to improve the cleaning process of post-consumer material, eliminating in a more effective and efficient way plastic impurities. We first studied in laboratory a wide sample of objects representative of wood garbage dump materials and we developed a new near infrared spectral method for materials identification and selection. We developed a pilot system for the automated online sorting of high volumes of waste wood to which we applied the new method. The material sorter is equipped with a Hyperspectral Imaging Spectroscopy (HIS) system, a conveyor and the processing system we tested. We present the approach and the first results of the identification and selection process.