LEATHER WASTE VALORISATION THROUGH MATERIAL INNOVATION: SOME PROPERTIES OF LEATHER WOOD FIBREBOARD

Abstract

Due to the ever-increasing scarcity of resources and raw materials in the wood panels industry, it is imperative to look for suitable alternatives to the established resources. Therefore a combination of the traditionally used and newly explored sources may reveal highly innovative ways. The objective of this study is to provide an insight into the behavior of the material and possible new applications of those fiber/particle wood and waste leather composites. For this reason exclusively fibers of spruce were used for the trials. Wet white (WW) leather particles and wet blue (WB) leather particles were mixed with the wooden materials for the production of high density fibreboards. Besides the mechanical properties such as the internal bond (IB) the bending strength (MOR) and modulus of elasticity (MOE) was analyzed. Further physical property as thickness swelling after 24h watering was investigated. To analyze how the density influences the behavior under thermal conditions, fiberboards with the densities 500, 700 and 900 kg/m³ were tested. The results of the material properties were influenced by the leather content of the panels. The results for the UF-bonded HDF boards show enhancement of the transverse IB with increasing wet blue leather content, whereas the other mechanical properties decline meanwhile. The thickness swelling showed higher values compared to the wood fibreboard. The results of this study underline the usefulness of integrating leather shavings to HDF and give an overview of their influence in wood fiber materials. The combination of the natural resource wood fiber and the leather waste products (Wet Blue and Wet White) gives a very interesting new material, its mechanical properties allow a variety of possible application in future applications.

Keywords

• wet white leather
• wet blue leather
• wood-leather based panels