Did you know that no tree is uprooted specifically for our production? We consciously choose recovered wood to produce quality products such as chipboard and MDF. Recovered wood is wood and wood waste that is no longer usable for someone else and we therefore save it from incineration. We give it an extra life by using it as raw material for new products.
This means that every day we save 4,000 trees from being felled. We source our raw material in a sustainable way so that felling is not necessary and we commit ourselves to keep wood in circulation for as long as possible.
Part of our raw material is pre-consumer wood. This is wood (waste) that has not yet had a product life and is produced as a by-product of activities. This may be residues from sawmills or the wood-processing industry, but also tree trunks from sustainable forest management or roadside maintenance. In order to keep the forest healthy, some small and crooked trees need to be uprooted and also to keep the roads safe.
The tree trunks you see on our wood park cannot be used for high-end applications such as solid wood planks.
All this wood would in principle be lost and incinerated, but at UNILIN we can give it high-quality material applications.
We also see the city as our forest and a source of raw materials. Where other wood-processing companies migrate to wooded areas, we remain anchored in one of the most urbanised areas of Western Europe. But cities are also a source of wood, the so-called “post-consumer wood”.
Society consumes a lot of wood in building applications, furniture,... This is good for the environment (wood is a renewable raw material) but also good for companies that want and dare to go a step further. Once the product life of this wood is over, it can be recycled into new raw material. Through far-reaching investments we have succeeded in converting this wood into a raw material for chipboard. In the meantime, we have succeeded in producing chipboard with more than 90% post-consumer wood. We will continue to invest in order to increase this percentage in the coming years.
We have the most advanced sorting and cleaning installation in the sector, many of the processes have been developed by UNILIN itself. The collected post-consumer wood ends up in the ultramodern pre-cleaning machine. In this installation, all impurities from the wood are separated using a combination of techniques, including magnets, wind sifters and centrifuges.
By investing around 40 million euros over the past 6 years, we have succeeded in giving more than a million tonnes of wood an extra life a year - wood that would otherwise be incinerated.
As a partner, you can visit our sorting and cleaning plant. Interested?
We obtain our raw materials thanks to smart partnerships with suppliers, including container parks, demolition firms, the packaging industry and even our own customers. What they consider to be waste, we use as raw materials. They can dispose of their residual materials, which we use in our production process. For this we also count on our partners and customers. But we also give them advice, tips and training to better manage and sort wood waste. In this way, they also become circular themselves.
We helped both Colruyt Group and Inntel Hotels Rotterdam to keep their ecological footprint to a minimum during their renovation works.
Would you like to become circular yourself? Please contact us.
