A Swedish-owned company, the Burapha furniture factory in Laos, is experimenting to make eucalyptus into a source of renewable, commercially viable timber.
Fuelled with £2.2m – some from backers including SwedForest, Ikea and the International Finance Corporation – Burapha aims to prove that eucalyptus plantation trees normally used for pulp and paper can be used for high quality furniture.
Bjorn Jacobsson, general manager of Ikea Trading Thailand, said his environment-conscious company had phased out the use of teak for outdoor furniture and was looking at eucalyptus as a potential alternative.
Young eucalyptus logs have a unique cell structure and can split apart violently.
Burapha has already developed a process to dry the wood very slowly with low heat – a method that takes three times as long as drying other timber such as pine. The factory is trying to find ways of bringing out the wood’s best colour and stopping reabsorbtion of moisture.
