Industrial Crops and Products 24 (2006) 177–180 Producing composite particleboard from kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus L.) stalks  H¨ ulya Kalaycıoglu ∗ ,G¨ okay Nemli Karadeniz Technical University, Faculty of Forestry, Trabzon, Turkey Received 21 June 2005; accepted 8 March 2006 Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate the usage of kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus L.) stalks as a raw material for particleboard manufacturing. The parameters affecting particleboard manufacturing from kenaf were determined to be press temperature, and time, pressure, density and shelling ratio. The experimental results showed that the parameters were found to be effective on the physical (thickness swelling) and mechanical (modulus of rupture, and internal bond strength) properties with the exception of pressure, significantly. It appears that kenaf can be used to manufacture particleboard. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Particleboard; Kenaf; Physical property; Mechanical properties 1. Introduction Particleboard is a wood based panel composite man- ufactured by compressing small wood particles while simultaneously bonding them with an adhesive. It is used in furniture, desk and counter tops, cabinets, floor, wall, ceiling panels, and office dividers (Wang and Sun, 2002). The past 50 years have seen the successful developments within the particleboard industry. Much of this success can be attributed to the decided economic advantage of low cost wood raw material and inexpensive with binders (Hofstrand et al., 1984). Many political, economic, social, geographic and environmental factors determine the availability and end use of natural, renewable resources throughout the world. Due to environmental movement, landfill regula-  Turkish Government Planning Organization supported this work. ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +90 462 3772807; fax: +90 462 3257499. E-mail address: khulya@ktu.edu.tr (H. Kalaycıoglu). tions, recycling trends, green movement, the available supply of wood is becoming scarce in the developed countries. The developing countries have already poor resources of wood for particleboard manufacturing. As a result, non-wood fibers play a major role in provid- ing the balance between supply and demand. It would seem that with suitable treatment almost any agricultural residue might be used as a suitable raw material for par- ticleboard. Researches have been carried out on a wide variety of crops from many different regions of the world. Among the raw materials are cereal straws (Mosesson, 1980), rice husks (Vasisth and Chandramouli, 1975), groundnut shells (Jain et al., 1967), bamboo (Rowell and Norimoto, 1988), waste of tea leaves (Ors and Kalaycioglu, 1991), bagasse (Turreda, 1983), cotton, hemp and jute stalks (Kollmann, 1966), cotton stalks (G¨ uler et al., 2002), pomace (G¨ ur¨ u, 2001), kiwi prun- ing (Nemli et al., 2003), flax shiv (Papadopoulos and Hague, 2003), vine pruning (Ntalos and Grigoriou, 2002), coir pith (Wiswanathan and Gothandapani, 1999), and almond shell (G¨ ur¨ u et al., in press). 0926-6690/$ – see front matter © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.indcrop.2006.03.011