Can wood wool be produced from plywood waste?

Question

For packaging of parcels, is it feasible/ possible to produce wood wool from the waste of plywood products?

If not, what alternative packaging uses are there for plywood waste?

Answer 1

Does anyone use wood wool anymore? It's all peanuts and bubbles now a days.

Wood wool depends on pulling long shavings with the grain. If you cut across the grain, the strand will break on a growth ring. With scraps, I think it would be hard to maintain the orientation of the scrap to the strand knives.

Successive layers of wood have grain at right angles.

The glue/resin would be tough on the knives. At least with other composite wood material, such as OSB, particle board, MDF board, are tough on saw blades, and result in the need for sharpening with much higher frequency.

Wood wool doesn't compress well (ok, it doesn't re-expand well after shipping)needs to produced near the place of use, otherwise you pay through the nose for shipping.

Alternative use.

The glue content makes it necessary to burn it under controlled conditions. Not advisable to use it for fuel in your wood stove. Depending on the glue formulation you will get anything from dioxins (very bad) to formaldehyde (somewhat bad) at domestic wood burning temps.

large scraps can enter the reuse and hobby stream. E.g. Square foot scraps make bird houses, kids puzzles. If you are producing this on contractor levels, have a rack by your office where you give it away, or sell at cheap. Hire a high school kid to trim the edges straight, and produce a raft of standard sizes. If the kid is any good, put him to work on another project. If he's a slow learner, he hasn't cost you much money

But why not grind it up and feed into the particle board stream? The cost of grinding it will make it more expensive than the usual source -- sawmill waste, but not by much. Particle board and plywood are an obvious match in a production plant. Much of the equipment is similar, and making plywood is going to have all sorts of waste bits anyway. This is certainly cheaper than paying landfill disposal fees for it.