Sunday 1 November 2009

What happens when you dump your old kitchen

I recently redecorated the kitchen and threw out old cabinets. I took them to a local dump and put them in the wood skip: are they recycled or just dumped in the ground?

While it would be satisfying to imagine your discarded kitchen goods recycled into other products, the sad truth is there’s a better than evens chance they’ll end up in landfill.

Recycling rates for wood and a wide range of other goods and products have improved in recent years. In the mid 1990s, less than 2 per cent of discarded wood a year was recycled. That figure is now between 40 and 50 per cent — good progress but it still means that every 12 months the equivalent of several forests are chucked into holes in the ground.

The UK imports about two thirds of its wood used in building, paper and other industries, most of its “softwoods” coming from Scandinavia and Russia. Though wood is biodegradable and might not create as many long-term landfill problems as other manufactured products, it creates methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide, as it gently rots away.

Each year anything between five and ten million tonnes of wood is thrown away in the UK — no one is entirely sure of the volume. The bulk of the wood that is recycled goes to making panel boards for the building trade. Recycled wood is also used for garden and park mulches and increasingly, is shredded to make bedding for cattle, horses and poultry.

Kitchen cabinets are regarded as the low-grade end of the used-wood market. Most are made from woodchip and are bound by glue and other substances, all of which have to be filtered out when recycled. Because of present economic conditions, there is a surplus of used wood on the market. But the great hope for the future are wood-fuelled biomass power plants: wood surpluses could be burned as more of these facilities come on stream. Wood recycling groups, operating in virtually every city and county, are an excellent drop off and buying point for used-wood products. Find out where your local one is at the charity Furniture Re-Use Network www.frn.org.uk.

Households throw away relatively little wood, the building industry is responsible for the bulk of it. Take your cabinets along to the nearest community wood centre and try swapping them for some building industry scaffolding boards, ideal as liners for raised vegetable beds?

So much better than consigning your old kitchen to a hole in the ground.

Send your eco-dilemmas to

greenandconfused@thetimes.co.uk



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Clive Burghard wrote:
When people decide to have a 'new' kitchen, why not just replace the doors if you are disenchanted with their appearance?
The 'new' cupboards will only be sawdust and glue, just like the old ones. So why pay for someone to rip them out and then replace them with the same thing, when all you see is the door?
October 31, 2009 8:48 AM GMT on community.timesonline.co.uk

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Robert Elliott wrote:
If our government was forward thinking we would burn all this wood to produce electricity and heating. They aren't and we don't.
October 25, 2009 2:35 PM GMT on community.timesonline.co.uk
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Simon Healy wrote:
At least they count chip (or pellet) the wood and use it for heating (enough larger establishments have wood burning boilers these days. Using Greenhouse neutral wood is far better (and cheaper) than heating with oil, gas or electricity plus you avoid landfill and the ash can be mixed with compost for good effect.
October 21, 2009 11:25 AM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

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D B wrote:
I can only imagine that middle class wood wars are more intense down south - but even here in the staid Midlands, we have so many neighbours with wood burning stoves that we have to be careful to be fair when sharing out branches from garden trees. Others get old pallets dropped off, some ask for old floorboards from houses that are being renovated. I wouldn't like to be seen taking wood up to the dump.
October 20, 2009 5:56 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

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Robert Davidson wrote:
I work in the forestry industry and a lot

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