Funding tool: Applied research projects
Project-ID: FTI24-A-011
Project start: 01. Juni 2026
Project end: 31. Mai 2029
Runtime: 36 months / not yet started
Funding amount: € 353.723,00

Brief summary:
The increased use of wood as a renewable CO2 reservoir for the construction of buildings is one of the EU's sustainable strategies to counteract climate change by greening the construction industry, which is known as a CO2 emitter. Looking at the resulting increase in demand for wood in the coming decades, it is obvious that simply using "more wood" will not be enough in terms of resources. The "ReCoWo" project is taking up the challenge and aims to combine technically implemented circular economy strategies with digital tools and bring them to the construction industry. The project focuses on wood-based formwork materials from DOKA. Although formwork material can already be reused several times for the same purpose according to the re-use principle, the materials are currently disposed of after a few uses on the construction site without being precisely assigned to their origin and are no longer used for higher-value purposes. The aim of the "ReCoWo" project is to apply a wider range of possible circular utilization concepts, so-called R-strategies, such as refurbish or remanufacture to formwork materials in order to keep them in their intended use for even longer or generating completely new construction products using a repurpose strategy. A key step here is the non-destructive quality analysis of post-consumer formwork material in conjunction with digital tools such as artificial intelligence in order to move from a currently exclusively operator-based assessment step to a semi-automated and, in the final step, fully automated post-consumer timber assessment tool. The results of "ReCoWo" will not only benefit Lower Austria and its construction industry, but will also point the way towards a circular economy for construction products in general on a laboratory scale.

Keywords:
post-consumer wood, circular use concepts, R-strategies for engineered wood products, sustainable construction materials