Particleboard, engineered wood products as part of a large family of wood composite materials, developed in use mainly in the 1950s and 1960s to utilize inferior wood and wood waste when good-quality wood was in short supply; the annual production capacity worldwide is over 100 million m3. It is also necessary to have a lot of wood raw material for its production, although raw material resources are limited on our planet. In addition to the main wood species, it is therefore possible to think about the wider use of alternative, lesser-known European species of alder, larch, and birch in particleboard production. These three wood species represent an eco-friendly and sustainable wood alternative to the conventional wood raw materials used. This review confirms the diversity of the use of these three species in different fields and proves their suitability in relation to particleboard production. Fundamental research is ongoing in certain universities to determine the proportional shares of use of these tree species in particleboard (in a certain weight proportion in their core layers) for the purpose of formulating the correct technology shares and rules for their application in the wood-based panel industry.
Keywords: alder; birch; larch; lesser-known European species; particleboard; raw materials; wood-based panels.