Development of Particleboard from Green Coconut Waste

• Published in: Journal of physics. Conference series 2021-12, Vol.2120 (1), p.12034
• Main Authors: Lim, J X, Ong, T K, Ng, C K, Chua, I W, Lee, Y B, Yap, Z Y, Bakar, R Abu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1742-6588; 1742-6596
• DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/2120/1/012034

In this study, green coconut waste was successfully transformed into coconut fibre-based particleboards. In addition to urea-formaldehyde (UF), two types of green binder: BST00 (low ammoniated latex and epoxidized natural rubber latex-based) and BST20 (epoxidized natural rubber latex-based) were used in particleboard fabrication. The particleboards were fabricated using coconut pith and fibre with 15% binder loading through two pre-compression steps followed by a final hot compression at 140 °C for 15 mins at ∼2.1 MPa. Board properties such as density, thickness swelling (TS), water absorption (WA), and internal bond (IB) strength were determined in accordance with JIS A 5908 standard, except for modulus of rupture (MOR) (ASTM D1037). BST00-bonded particleboards exhibit the poorest properties among the three samples, making BST00 the least effective binder. BST20-bonded particleboards show the best overall properties with the highest density of ∼1 g/cm 3 , IB value of 0.416 MPa, MOR of 11.61 MPa, best water resistance with TS of 14% and WA of 24%. The UF-bonded particleboards have the highest MOR of 12.05 MPa. Overall, the UF- and BST20-bonded coir particleboards met the minimum JIS A 5908 requirement except density (0.4-0.9 g/cm 3 ) and TS (