Every year, several thousand tons of treated wood waste is buried, incinerated, or mixed with untreated wood waste. The management of this waste is problematic because treated wood contains preservatives such as arsenic, chromium, and copper to slow its deterioration. To remedy this, INRS researchers have found a simple, effective, and environmentally friendly solution. They have developed a process that successfully removed more than 90% of the contaminants present in treated wood waste in experiments conducted on a small scale in the laboratory. …Once decontaminated, the wood waste can be reused as a raw material for the manufacture of value-added products such as particleboard or heating pellets. In addition, recovered metals could potentially be used to manufacture by-products, such as chromium oxide and copper sulphate.