The recent announcement that the Government intends to restrict wood from being sent to landfill will only add a small amount of wood to the UK market.
In the report UK Waste Wood Market from Tolvik Consulting and prepared with GE Environmental Consultants, it found that in 2010 a maximum of 1.1 million tonnes of waste wood was landfilled in the UK with approximately 74 per cent of wood recovered.
It estimates that better resource efficiency in the wood supply chain will result in relatively steady future levels of waste wood arisings and that any increase in the supply of waste wood to the market would need to come from improved recovery rates.
Based on an 85 per cent recovery rate by 2015, this will be about 0.5 million tonnes with much of this already earmarked for UK biomass energy facilities.
It also says that developers of biomass facilities where this 0.5 million tonnes of extra wood is likely to go to, will also face competition from the more mature markets of northern Europe. In particular, biomass facilities near to ports in the south and east coasts will feel the competition from Europe most. For the panel board sector, this could pose a long-term threat to supply, it suggests.
