Building products made from recovered paper and cardboard: applicability and first conclusions

The need of decreasing the amount of waste produced and released into the environment and, simultaneously, to preserve the resources close to extinction, led to the use of recycled and recyclable material even in the construction process. On one hand, this contributed to help reducing waste for disposal and on the other, to reduce the consumption of natural resources. In this paper the feasibility of applying innovative building products made from recovered waste was investigated, with particular focus on products derived from recovered paper and cardboard in order to identify whether they can be a real alternative to more traditional products contributing to make the building process more sustainable. While the use of products derived from recycled glass, steel and even plastics can be more easily conceived by the fact that these materials are already being perceived as part of the construction, paper and cardboard may seem about as far from the robustness and resistance commonly associated with buildings. The decision to narrow the research to products from recovered paper and cardboard has been dictated by the fact that the paper industry is among the areas where the use of recycling achieved the best results and where, consequently, there are large quantities of recycled material to re-emit in the production cycle. In order to analyze the real applicability of these products, three aspects have been identified and explored: • the commodity aspect; • the standard aspect; • the informative aspect. The in depth study of the commodity aspect is vital to understand the derivation of the analyzed products and from which recycling processes it is possible to obtain the raw material from which they are made of. Knowledge of the standard framework is useful in order to understand the evolution of the environmental standards, both on an European scale and on a national scale, which favored the use of raw materials from recycling processes. Moreover, it leads to the understanding of the conditions and of the various applications in which products derived from recovered paper and cardboard are used at the same level of traditional products in the construction process. Finally, given the innovation these products represent, acknowledging the current state of supply on the market, the level of information to understand the applications for which these products are a real alternative to traditional products and the real environmental benefits that might result from their use become fundamental.