Fasal Wood - From wood flour to toys

– The business model

The processing of wood raw materials generates 40 percent by-products, including around 4 million cubic meters of sawdust. Most of this is a valuable raw material for the paper and board industry, and a lot of it is now also thermally processed in the form of pellets or briquettes.

The development of Fasal has opened up further market opportunities for this by-product in the form of an injection moulding granulate that can be processed on all conventional injection moulding machines. The name stands for the main component fibres and cereals, i.e. the compound consists of wood fibres and a carbohydrate-rich raw material like maize. Both must have a certain degree of comminution and moisture content.

Fasal is the only "biological" injection moulding granulate that can compete with conventional plastics in price. Other alternatives are two to three times as expensive. Fasal is also used for technical parts such as stacking boxes, closures, tool handles, etc. Due to its special acoustic properties, whole clarinets have recently been produced, which are not inferior in sound quality to wood clarinets. A high commercial potential of this product is seen in the market for ecological toys.

Fasal was developed over many years at the Institute for Natural Product Technology at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences (IFA Tulln, Niederösterreich, Austria).

Thanks to this practice farmers have an additional opportunity to sell wood residues in the market and benefit of better prices for value-added products.

In Austria, its suitability for floor tiles is being explored, while Italian suppliers in the furniture and automotive industries are investigating the possibility to apply Fasal in their products.

 – The process

In the Fasal wood practice, all ingredients are mixed dry and sent through an extruder. This machine originally comes from the food industry, where it is used, for example, for creating pasta patterns. Today, however, extrusion is one of the most important processes in the plastics industry. Through heating, pressuring and shearing energy, the ingredients are disintegrated, combined and formed into granules (small cylindrical grains).  The resulting thermoplastic material can be transformed into complex parts by injection moulding. The parts have a wood-like appearance and wood-like properties. Due to the isotropic structure, grain in the conventional sense cannot be achieved, but structures can be achieved by adding coarser wood fibres.

The material consists of about 60% wood flour from spruces and firs from sustainable forest management, the rest is high-quality recycled plastic or resins of bio-based origin.

Plastic usually comes from returnable cups used at festivals and events. These are sterilised, ground and inserted into the process together with wood shavings.

The fibre content can be up to 60 percent. Resins and processing aids are added to achieve certain properties. The resins can also be of natural origin - this results in a fully biological variant - or of synthetic origin, i.e. from fossil sources.

The parts have high strength values and high surface hardness, and can be polished, painted or dyed with colour granulates. The outstanding swelling and shrinkage behavior are impressive compared to wood. Fasal bodies are subject to almost no dimensional change with changing air humidity, some formulations also show high form fidelity at high temperatures.