ENAre you struggling to move biobased industry towards the circular economy? Longstanding research on wood cascading (i.e. maintenance and reprocessing of biomass at its highest material value before converting it to bioenergy) has identified a variety of factors to enable a more efficient, circular use of forest-based products in Europe. We provide an overview of these factors and their interactions.
Based on our review, two of the most critical barriers for wood cascading are:
- Competition between energy and material uses of waste wood in policy, market and infrastructure.
- Missing information on and low quality of waste wood, including pollutant
content.
Action recommendations for policy and business:
- Redesign production processes to deal with contamination and increase quality
- Coordinate energy and waste policies across departments
- Advance reporting standards about material composition of bioproducts
- Explore the best types of involvement, awareness raising, communications and policies