Holding it all together are a range of innovative resins and glues with the strength and versatility to create a new generation of reconstituted timber products, based on Australian hardwoods. Laminated beams, for example, can now be made from veneers bonded together with the grains running in the same direction.
Dr Bob Coutts, the chief research scientist at the Forest Products Laboratory in Melbourne, said 600,000 hectares of mixed eucalypt forest in East Gippsland and the Central Highlands of Victoria could support a large-scale processing industry. "Growing markets in Asia and the Pacific region for reconstituted wood products reflect a worldwide increase in the use of laminated and bonded timbers" he said.
Dr Coutts, whose ground-breaking work formed part of a $500,000 project over three years, anticipates up to 800,000 cubic metres of suitable wood could be available annually, mostly lowgrade timber that has been mainly used for producing woodchips. It could now be transformed into laminated veneer lumber and mediumdensity fibreboard.
The plethora of imaginative Australian products made from reconstituted wood now consists almost entirely of softwoods. One reason for the burgeoning interest in hardwood products is the timber industries inability to continue to meet demand for large hardwood beams. "If you want a beam a metre deep for large structures or bridges, instead of waiting for years and years for a tree to grow to that diameter, you can make the beam," Dr Coutts said. "Pieces of veneer are glued with the fibres aligned in the same direction as a natural beam." The researchers used commercial scale equipment to demonstrate that engineering-grade products could be derived successfully from wood from East Gippsland and the Central Highlands.
They also found relatively high-quality materials could be produced
from mixed hardwoods. "The high density of the hardwoods and the
substances they exude meant that conventional gluing systems would not
perform adequately," said Dr Coutts. "But we developed resins in
the laboratory which can be used to make a high-grade commercial product."