Kitchen furniture is the most cost-effective branch of all industries from the wood furniture manufacturing group (Ellefson et al. 2010). Only in the United States, homeowners remodel upwards of 10.2 million kitchens each year and the cost of purchasing a new countertop account for 10% of kitchen remodelling total cost (Koenig 2017). According to study of The Freedonia Group (2017), global demand for countertops is projected to rise 2.3% annually through 2021, to nearly 500 million square meters, which means a continuous growth in the global production of wood-based boards. However, the manufacturing capacity in wood-based materials industry depends on the access to global resources of timber which is limited. This results from growing deficit of wood, international economic competitiveness, demographic changes etc. The previously-mentioned difficulties lead to search for the new materials that can be used for the particleboards production. The primary purpose of this work was to determine possibility of using sawmill industry by-products to manufacture innovative panels which can be used in the production of countertops.
Keywords: panels, furniture, particleboard, swelling
Authors
Jakub Kawalerczyk
Poznań University of Life Sciences, Poland
Radosław Mirski
Dorota Dziurka
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