Commercial Demonstration of Wood Recovery, Recycling, and Value Adding Technologies

This commercial demonstration project demonstrated the technical feasibility of converting low-value, underutilized and waste stream solid wood fiber material into higher valued products. With a growing need to increase product/production yield and reduce waste in most sawmills, few recovery operations and practically no data existed to support the viability of recovery operations. Prior to our efforts, most all in the forest products industry believed that recovery was difficult, extremely labor intensive, not cost effective, and that recovered products had low value and were difficult to sell. This project provided an opportunity for many within the industry to see through demonstration that converting waste stream material into higher valued products does in fact offer a solution. Our work, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, throughout the project aimed to demonstrate a reasonable approach to reducing the millions of recoverable solid wood fiber tons that are annually treated as and converted into low value chips, mulch and fuel. Consequently sawmills continue to suffer from reduced availability of forest resources, higher raw material costs, growing waste disposal problems, increased global competition, and more pressure to operate in an Environmentally Friendly manner. It is our belief (based upon the experience of this project) that the successful mainstreaming of the recovery concept would assist in alleviating this burden as well as provide for a realistically achievable economic benefit to those who would seriously pursue the concept and tap into the rapidly growing ''GREEN'' building marketplace. Ultimately, with participation and aggressive pursuit of the recovery concept, the public would benefit in that: (1) Landfill/disposal waste volume could be reduced adding greater life to existing municipal landfill sites thereby minimizing the need to prematurely license and open added facilities. Also, there would be a cost avoidance benefit associated to what would have been the added municipal (community) management costs involved with maintaining closed landfills. (2) With greater quantities of recovered material being returned to and integrated into manufacturing and the marketplace, reduced demand upon virgin wood sources could help lead the way to promoting improved relations and environmental balance between producers and consumers further expanding the value of our natural resource without adding environmental burden