Resinless Plywood Production by Using Oxidized Acacia Bark Powder as a Binder

Nowadays, the established technology in plywood industries for producing plywood is still using adhesive as veneer bonding agent. Utilization of the adhesive has several of weaknesses such as containing formaldehyde compound and using the unrenewable raw material. The purpose of this research was to develop a novel technique to produce plywood without involving adhesive as a binder. The oxidized bark powder of Acacia mangium was utilized as a binder to substitute the adhesive. Bark powder was oxidized by using hydrogen peroxide on four levels (5%, 10%, 15%, 20%) and the catalyst. The result showed that utilization of oxidized bark powder can be applied in producing resinless plywood. Unless the plywood with 15% of hydrogen peroxide, the other plywood fulfil the National Indonesian Standard (SNI) No 01-5008.2-2000 where min. 7 kg/cm2 as the requirement. The plywood with 20 percent of hydrogen peroxide has the highest bonding strength (13.24 kg/cm2). After immersing this plywood in hot water (70°C) for 2 hours and drying in the oven (60°C) for 3 hours, the wood failure test also showed a good value, namely 76.15 percent. These facts indicated that the bonding and the water resistant of the plywood were relatively high. It tends that the technology for producing resinless plywood is potential to be developed.