Recycled Wood Furniture

Just about anything can be recycled. Even those that we think as disposables, like plastic, do get recycled. Well, maybe not all. Those discarded electronic circuit boards in computers don’t. So are those junked television picture tubes. Though I recall an art exhibit featuring a gigantic collection of picture tubes piled up to look like art. Now that’s another concept of recycling. I know that those shiny metallic musical Compact Discs and DVDs when discarded often end up as cup coasters or alarm clock faces.
But that’s going overboard. Let me just talk about recycling and what comes to mind are wood products. Newspaper sheets that come from wood pulp get recycled many times. Paper products, apart from glass, are the darling of the 20th century phenomenon of recycling. How about wood in furniture’s? Yes they do get recycled as well. You can exclude antique furniture’s. Because antiques don’t get recycled. They’re just cleaned off. You use the same furniture over the years and their value actually appreciates the older they look. And if someone who used them is famous, it will further enhance its value, or if they figure in an event that gets annotated in classroom history books.
But recycled wood are used in making furniture is entirely another. Recycling wood can be better explained as reclaimed wood. That means wood from some previously crafted thing being disembodied and made into another. I don’t mean re-use. Re-use connotes taking apart furniture and using the same item, say a headboard, to be used as the headboard in another furniture. Like those wooden ship navigation wheels that get displayed in living rooms – from a functional existence to a decorative item. There are plenty of those around.
Wood Recycling means reclaiming the wood in furniture to be used once again as material for another furniture. Recycling or reclaiming wood might actually involve a more elaborate and expensive process than just felling a 50-year old tree somewhere in Brazil and making boards from them. I read somewhere that recycling involved grinding the wooden furniture to sawdust levels and gluing them with special adhesives to form what is called plywood and particle boards.
But I really find the concept a little defeatist. I mean, with so many wooden furniture getting so expensive, I wonder who in their right mind would dispose any to be ground and recycled as plywood and particle board that are inferior to solid wood in strength and beauty.
Of course I know that particle boards are acoustically well suited as speaker cabinets and that Plywood gets used in building materials as interior ceilings and walls. But nothing makes for a better appreciation of wood than in furniture.

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