Tilia sp.’s pruning residues wood panels for thermal insulation

Taking good care of urban nature is a crucial task to enhance the livability of ever densifying urban contexts. Excellent management techniques are needed to optimize the ecosystem services that urban nature, especially urban forestry, is capable of supplying. Providing such care is an on-going challenge due to the economic hardship of public administrations and to a general cultural decline in term of skillset and adequately formed personnel within the municipality’s staff. This situation highlights the diffused lack of strategies for the valorization of public goods and to the fear of changing consolidated management’s modalities. Urban forestry by-products originated by management practices, in particular, pruning, are seldom exploited, but they offer an opportunity that could translate in better maintenance for urban arboreal patrimony, with the entire positive outcome that this could imply in terms of ecosystem services, public safety, and quality of life. This chapter presents the first step of an on-going research project that has the aim to understand the potential of the valorization of pruning wastes of one of the most common tree species in urban greening and forestry: Tilia sp. (Linden tree). The case study was carried out in the city of Perugia (Italy) and entailed the shredding of linden tree’s pruning residues and the creation and testing of three samples of tiles, with different densities, obtained mixing linden wool and polyvinyl acetate (PVA) glue. The thermal conductivity (λ) results of the three samples are very similar despite the density’s difference (8.37±0.76; 8.30±0.54; 8.60±1.40×10−2 W/m K) and comparable with benchmark values of comparable off-the-shelf materials produced with wood residues from the timber industry, even if still lower. The lower performances values could be more related to geometric characteristics, than intrinsic ones. The results shown as linden tree’s pruning residues could be a good source material to create construction panels for thermal insulation purposes.