What happens to pallets when they have been used beyond their useful life? And what about the troughs? What should be done with the wooden beams of an old building that is going to be demolished or whose rehabilitation does not include continuing to use those structural elements? One option would be scrapping and landfilling. Another, increasingly common, is to give that wood a second life through recovery and recycling. Perhaps the wood in that room of a small, sustainable hotel was used in a previous life to cultivate mussels.
When talking about wood, it is usually referred to as an infinite resource (we can plant trees). The longevity of this material is evidenced by furniture passed down from generation to generation, which, even when deteriorated by the passage of time, can be restored and made to look like new with the appropriate treatment. You can also go a step further: clean and treat the material well and transform it into something completely different. A perfect example of a circular economy.
Recycling is the best option for wood that can no longer simply be reused -as endorsed by the European Union’s waste management hierarchy- a preferable destination to converting the material into fuel for energy generation or directly disposing of it through incineration or burying it in a landfill. According to Eurostat data, almost 47 million tons of wood waste are generated across the European Union (EU), of which around 40% is recycled.
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“With that pallet, with that packaging, with that piece of furniture that you and I can throw away at the recycling centre, we can make something new, so that that wood whose only destination seemed to be a landfill or incineration becomes a board”, explains Juan Carlos Moure, director of Evolta, the recovery and recycling division of Finsa. It is a way to extend the life of a material.
How to recycle wood: from troughs to the porch
About twenty years ago, Pepe Suárez, from the sawmill Hijos de Vicente Suárez in Outes (A Coruña), had the idea that the beams from the mussel rafts could be used to build the structure of a porch for his house, because he likes “rustic and unusual things”. The idea didn’t take off because his family disagreed. He also failed to sell it in Galicia, where “everyone used that wood for firewood and it wasn’t valued”, so he went abroad. Since then, their recycled wood has been sold throughout the Basque Country, the Levante region, Ibiza and even the Canary Islands.
Suárez knew that the wood used for wooden troughs is very resistant because they are also responsible for its construction at the sawmill itself. After that first use, the trough comes out of the sea and a whole process begins that gives a new life to the material and allows the company to close the circle. “The first thing we do is a cleaning. If it is for a more structural use, the cleaning of nails, iron, etc., is less because some elements can be left inside. But if we’re going to machine it to make a table or something elaborate, we have to remove everything. Then comes another cleaning, this one with air, to remove shell fragments, sand, etc.”, he explains.
Also at Evolta, after all the logistics of collecting wood waste from different points -for which they try to reduce its volume at the source and thus facilitate transport- they treat the material according to the needs to end up manufacturing the recycled boards. “In each of the factories, depending on the quantities and consumption capacities, we have specialised mechanical cleaning and segregation systems. Because that wood doesn’t arrive alone, it comes with a series of materials that are not wood, such as plastic, steel or copper”, he says.
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Not all wood waste can be used (“some is always lost in the process, you don’t use the whole ton of wood”), but it is a way to reduce the final waste volume by extending the life of the material.
Why choose recycled wood?
A question that may arise when becoming interested in the world of recovery and recycling of this material is whether there are uses for which brand-new wood is better and others where recycled wood is more advisable. “The board is not better or worse for containing recycled wood”, says Moure, from Evolta. In fact, the key to the whole process is that “by introducing these types of materials, the physical and mechanical characteristics of the board do not change”. Furthermore, he cites as a major advantage of recycling that this wood is a dry material, thus saving the energy consumed by drying processes.
For Pepe Suárez, the profile of his clients is that of “someone who knows what they want and who wants to pay for it. Someone interested in having traceability, in knowing that it is recovered”, he explains. When they deliver their products, now under the Simar brand, registered in 2025, they do so with a QR code that certifies the entire process. “We geolocated the trough at sea to be able to see where the wood came from. Then there is a whole process of dismantling, cleaning, sorting, etc., until the final product is reached. And we include the carbon footprint, which is negative”, he says.
These are just a couple of concrete examples of ways in which wood is being recycled, one more artisanal and the other completely industrialised. But there are many more cases: wood from house beams, from posts like those for electricity, from old railway tracks, from furniture… In recent years, moreover, with the challenge of sustainability and European regulations, delaying the moment when wood becomes waste with no future has become more common. “I have been in the recycling sector for almost 30 years. I would go to landfills, see immense amounts of wood, and tell myself that it was impossible that nothing could be done with all of it. Now it’s the other way around”, says the director of Evolta. “Now it’s difficult to see wood in a landfill. It’s a great job that we’ve all done together: we’ve managed to make something that was a big problem decades ago into a useful material again”.
