Cross-country comparison on environmental impacts of particleboard production in Brazil and Spain

Abstract

Remarkable differences can be found between Brazilian and Spanish production of wood-based products. The purpose of this study is to analyze and compare the environmental performance of particleboard production in both countries. The results showed that the greatest impacts in four impact categories correspond to Brazilian particleboards, because of the use of heavy fuel-oil and virgin wood as energy source and raw material respectively, as well as uncontrolled formaldehyde emissions. On the contrary, Spanish production reports worse results in other impacts (eutrophication and toxicity related categories) mostly due to the large demand of diesel in the mobile chipping machine. A sensitivity analysis based on the variation of scenarios considering multifunctionality issues to produce particleboards in Brazil and Spain was conducted. The allocation approach (economic and mass) showed a relevant influence for all impact categories for the Brazilian scenarios in order to reduce most of the environmental impacts, however, it has increased most of the impacts for the Spanish ones due to the change of perspective in the hypothesis that wooden residues are free of environmental burden. The use of the substitution method to address the multifunctional processes displayed the lowest values for almost all impact categories, and especially for Spain, where the avoided impacts from wooden waste were so high that they covered all the life cycle impacts of the particleboards life cycle on many occasions, meaning that there was a net benefit, as the overall environmental impacts were more than offset by the avoided impacts.