MDF Recovery

This innovative project is in collaboration with the following supply chain partners:

Recovering Wood Fibre from Waste MDF

MDF Recovery Ltd has developed a novel, proprietary process to recover wood fibre from waste MDF. Until now, landfill or burning were the only options for disposing of MDF. With funding from Innovate UK through the "Supply Chains for the Circular Economy" competition, MDF Recovery Ltd is working with the BioComposites Centre to further develop the technology, with the aim of making the process commercially viable.

The project “Medium Density Fibreboard: Enhancing Supply Chain Value" offers a better ecological solution for MDF disposal, which generates a new raw material source for the wood/natural fibre industry that reduces demand on standing forests. The recovered fibre is of the same high quality as virgin wood fibre and provides a feedstock to the manufacturers of MDF board, insulation products and formable packing materials.

There is over 40 years’ production of MDF embedded in products and buildings and over 25 million tonnes of new product are manufactured every year, 1 million of which is produced in the UK, none is currently recycled. MDF Recovery can help to save money and increase resource efficiency throughout the supply chain.

This project aims to design, build and operate a pilot scale waste MDF processing plant that will demonstrate the effectiveness of the concept. This will facilitate the subsequent scaling up of the technology to commercial scale and introduction of closed loop recycling for waste MDF in the UK.

Further details available on MDF Recovery website.