The wood recycling industry is a mere infant. It barely existed even 25 years ago. But in those days, of course, we were frankly uneducated in this country when it came to recycling. I remember moving house as recently as the 1990s, and my many visits to the "council tip" were pretty straightforward. I heaved all my rubbish into a single skip, and off it went to landfill. We've come a long way since then, thank goodness, and the wood recycling industry has played its part in the revolution. When a small number of pioneers spotted that wood might be worth recycling, they needed a market and found one in the panel-board industry. In those early days, as much as 95 percent of recycled wood went to the board mills, normally to be mixed in with virgin wood. The recycled element had the advantage of being much drier than virgin (typically about 20 percent moisture against 50 percent-plus), and it was also cheaper.
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