LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) of EVP – engineering veneer product: plywood glued using a vacuum moulding technology from green veneers

Abstract

The production of plywood represents a major proportion of engineered wood products. The traditional manufacturing process requires very thorough drying of the wood before gluing. Gluing green wood is a new technology which can be applied to plywood vacuum moulding. Gluing wood when it is in a green state can be done, because it can be dried by the vacuum at the same time that pressure is applied for the gluing. The main interest of this method is that it reduces considerably the number of steps in its manufacture. The aim of this paper is to propose a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in order to validate the use of the vacuum process with green veneers. The types of glue, the gluing techniques (by vacuum or traditional methods) and the wood varieties have been compared. The functional analysis focused on 4 traditional plywood in order to compare it with our product. The 5 products meet the quality requirements of plywood EN 13986 (2004). The environmental modelling was carried out according to the ISO 14040, standard of life cycle assessment, principles and framework, starting from existing databases and from measurements taken on manufacturing sites and during the testing. The model shows that there is a significant interest in the technology of gluing green wood with a vacuum process compared to the conventional approach. For an industrial use, the disadvantage of this new technology is the use of consumables but that could be reduced considerably in industrial production by using reusable consumables.