Wood at Unilin

What does Unilin do with wood?

Wood is our most important raw material. We use it in our chipboard, laminate flooring, parquet flooring, MDF and HDF boards, and insulating roof elements. In other words, a wide range of our products are wood based. Wood accounts for 64% of our total mix of raw materials.

And yet, wood is so much more than just a raw material to us. It is a sustainable, renewable product that we handle in a very conscious way.

Why does Unilin want to recycle so much wood?

It is our mission to keep wood in the circular supply chain for as long as possible. After all, wood stores CO₂ for as long as it doesn't disintegrate or burn. Processed wood, such as laminate, chipboard or MDF panels, also stores CO₂. In addition, wood can be used as a raw material several times and for different applications. This means the CO₂ is preserved even longer – until the wood can no longer be used or recycled.

So, the longer we use and reuse wood, the more our climate benefits.

How do we do this?

Over the past decade, we have invested millions in the development of the most advanced, high-tech cleaning and sorting machine in our industry. We clean up some 900,000 tonnes of waste wood a year. This means that 95% of the wood in our chipboard is now recycled.

The situation is different for MDF and HDF boards, because until recently, they were impossible to recycle. Unilin was the first in the world to successfully develop a process to recycle even those boards on an industrial scale. We are now upscaling that process.