steam treatment (Li et al., 2011) or mechanical method to pulverize
the wax layer (El-Kassas and Mourad, 2013) were necessary.
The water resistance of the boards made from rice straw remained
a problem to overcome.
Accordingly, rice straw boards bonded with synthetic resin have
many compatibility issues between the raw materials and resins.
On the other hand, binderless board, a board that contains no resin,
is potentially an effective solution to overcome these issues while
also avoiding the formaldehyde emission associated with UF resin.
The absence of adhesive meets both environmental and economic
requirements. Binderless boards have been successfully manufactured
from Miscanthus sinensis (Velasquez et al., 2003) and wheat
straw (Halvarsson et al., 2009), which, like rice, belong to the Poaceous
family. There has been no information about properties of
binderless boards made from rice straw until now. Therefore, the
purpose of this study was to manufacture binderless boards from
rice straw and to discuss the morphological effect of particles from
rice straw on the properties of the boards. For the morphological
effect of particles, we examined the influence of particle size and
the morphological part of rice straw.