Development of a composite product from fibre yielding crop residues

Particleboard is one of the wood-based composite products, developed from wood and wood industry waste in admixture with an adhesive by thermos-compression. Wood is gradually becoming scarce due to deforestation and it leads to search for an alternative raw material. Jute, flax, and hemp plants are important fibre yielding industrial crops since their respective farming provides economic support to the developing nations from the rural areas. After the extraction of fibres from them, a lot of biomasses in terms of shives and sticks are generated as agricultural waste, and recently, these lignocellulosic biomasses have attained a special attention for the development of medium density particleboard. In this present work, an attempt has made to study the effect of flax shive and jute stick particle blends in admixture with phenol formaldehyde resin on the performance of the particleboard in terms of density, modulus of rupture and water swelling. The particle size distribution, bulk density, chemical composition, thermal properties, and surface chemistry of jute stick and flax shive have studied to assess their compatibility. Results inferred that a 50% jute stick: 50% flax shive combination based particleboard met the desirable properties of a medium density particleboard and showed higher performance than other combinations. It could be concluding that the combined use of biomass residuals for the development of a potential industrial product like packaging box, furniture, false ceilings etc, and it could open a new avenue to their farmers for the creation of wealth from the waste.