New project aiming at the use of poplar for producing lighter furniture and environmentally friendly packaging

All-rounder poplar tree will make purchases lighter and more ecological!

Who can't relate to it, carrying heavy boxes after visiting a furniture store or the anger about tons of plastic and polystyrene after buying electrical devices? The EU-BBI-BIC-funded research project "Securing Sustainable Dendromass Production with Poplar Plantations in European Rural Areas", in short Dendromass4Europe, is focusing on the corresponding innovations for more eco-friendly purchases that are safer on the back. Scientists and industrial partners from seven countries work together for the next five years. The project kick-off meeting with all partners took place on 7th and 8th June 2017 at the TU Dresden. An excursion on SRC (short rotation crops) and on poplar and forest tree breeding in Saxony was held on 9th June for the interested partners. Professor Norbert Weber of the Professorship of Forest Policy and Forest Resource Economics at Technische Universitaet Dresden coordinates the project:

"Within this large-scale project and together with our European partners in industry and research we want to achieve several things at the same time: to generate wood biomass from poplars in an environmentally friendly way and to use the biomass to produce innovative products. Of course such a project requires many colleagues from different disciplines joining to work together."

Dendromass4Europe (D4E) aims at establishing sustainable, Short-Rotation Coppice (SRC)-based regional cropping systems for agricultural dendromass on marginal land that feed into bio-based value chains and create additional job opportunities in rural areas. For that purpose, 2,500 ha of short rotation poplar plantations will be established on marginal or currently unused land in rural areas of the Slovak Republic. These plantations will provide the feedstock for the establishment of four new bio-based value chains based upon products from wood and bark from poplar trees: (1) functionally adapted lightweight board manufactured by IKEA Industries (Slovakia). The new structure gives more stability to the boards, which will be lighter and consuming fewer resources. Poplar bark, which currently serves primarily as a source for energy, is processed by Pulpack (Poland) into (2) eco-fungicidal moulded fibre parts. These fibre parts can replace plastics in packaging and can also be re-used without any problems. At the same time, Energochemica Trading (Slovakia) plans to incorporate the bark into (3) bark-enriched wood-plastic composite and (4) wood-plastic granulate.

The researchers of the National Council for Research (Italy), the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Sweden) and Technische Universitaet Dresden support the industrial partners involved, with their expertise in the fields of agriculture, forestry and wood sciences. The Kompetenzzentrum Holz GmbH (Austria) and Daphne, Institute for Applied Ecology (Slovakia) are providing expertise on ecological questions of management. Stakeholders, especially the respective scientific and industrial communities, e.g. those of forest sciences, agricultural and forest policy, nature conservation and bio-based materials research will be informed and involved during the entire project for example via field demonstrations, publications and a project website as well as social media.

This project receives funding from the Bio Based Industries Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 745874.

Contacts:
Prof. Dr. Norbert Weber (project coordinator), ;
Prof. Dr. Martin Weih (representing IPC),