Wood is an increasingly demanded renewable resource and an important raw material for construction and interiors and other applications. Yet, 25% of the annually used wood turns into waste, which is mostly incinerated or - in much smaller proportions - turned into particle board. Attention for wood recycling and upcycling is thus growing. Used wood is increasingly being harvested from existing buildings or collected at waste collection sites, and research is being done for processing and re-using this wood waste. One of the most challenging problems related to wood waste re-use is the presence of metal in it. This metal can be functional, expected items, such as hinges in old doors or nails and screws in window frames. But wood can also contain unexpected metal items, such as randomly placed nails, screws and staples in doors applied by building occupants.

In this report, different X-ray solutions are presented and compared, in order to evaluate if/how they could be used for metal detection, prior to processing waste wood. These vary from scanning technologies already present on the market for wood industry, to other type of solutions like luggage scanners.