Barkbuild - Tree bark as a renewable source of wood protection materials for building applications

The BarkBuild project tackles climate change by developing long-lasting wood building materials from bark-based chemicals and wood with low environmental impact. This will replace products having a larger carbon footprint and poor environmental soundness.

It is the objective of this project to develop new bark-based wood protection and building formulations and demonstrate their technical performance, safety, and sustainability in wood impregnation, coating, and polymer composites in outdoor and indoor use. We will therefore assess the stability of different bark-based chemicals in wood impregnation and as a coating. The treatment of bulk wood with these chemicals needs to increase the resistance against wood degrading fungi and hopefully will improve other relevant wood properties as well. The application of these chemicals as a coating needs to prevent the underlying wood substrate from wetting and prevent the growth of surface fungi.

Various Nordic wood species will be used for the treatment with bark-based chemicals. This also includes difficult-to-treat species, which will be pre-treated to increase uptake. Therefore, it is important to determine the uptake and distribution of different bark-based chemicals in wood and optimise the treatment accordingly.

Ultimately, the material properties and its performance related to different use areas are important and will be analysed in the BarkBuild project.