WELCOME TO THE PLANETARY HOME IMPROVEMENT STORE ︎︎︎ TO FIND A PRODUCT, PLEASE SCROLL DOWN ON THE HOME PAGE ︎︎︎ The home improvement store is a geological site on demand. Rockwool, Sheetrock, Quikcrete. Materials are processed into products, packaged, stockpiled, stacked, and sold across global DIY supply-chains, from Bauhaus to OBI and Hornbach. Basalt, gypsum, limestone. Material economies are severed from mineral entanglements with millennia of rock, fossil, plant, and stone. The store is the modern quarry. It takes 1 day to install drywall; it takes 299 million years to form gypsum. ︎︎ TO FIND A PRODUCT, PLEASE SCROLL DOWN ︎︎︎





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PRODUCT SIZE
1200x2400x6mm

GEOLOGICAL PERIOD
Holocene 
100 YA

COMPOSITION
88-90% Wood chips, shavings, sawdust
10-12% Resin
GEOLOGICAL BIO
Particle board is ubiquitous, but it is not a wood you’d recognize. The baloney of wood products, it is a composite of scrap wood material: offcuts, sawdust, even floor sweepings, in the case of the first particle boards developed in Germany in the mid-20th century. It’s so reconstituted that even insects don’t recognize a home in it.

Waste-wood particles, barely holding together as a material, are given new structure with artificial binders such as urea formaldehyde (toxic if inhaled) or (in recent material investigations) natural tannins. Boards are faced in melamine resin impregnated paper of all colors and textures (think IKEA furniture). From that point, the only telltale sign of its scrap composition is from its unfinished edges.

See also Plywood, OSB, and Dimensional Lumber.

EXTRACTION / MANUFACTURING PROCESS
Collect and prepare raw materials (wood chips, wood scraps, timber) ︎︎︎ grind to uniform particles ︎︎︎ dry particles ︎︎︎ sort particles by size ︎︎︎ blend with resin and additives ︎︎︎ layer materials ︎︎︎ pre-press and hot press ︎︎︎ cool ︎︎︎ sand and finish ︎︎︎ pack and ship




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