Justin Catanoso is no stranger to wood pellet plants, as he lives near four of them in the U.S. state of North Carolina, where biomass giant Enviva has several facilities. While that company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this year, it remains the single largest producer of wood pellets globally. This firm is one of […]
Well here’s a wrinkle: I’m a woodworker, a hobbyist at the moment but I’m thinking of starting to sell furniture. Even at a hobbyist level building a table every couple weeks, I can generate pickup truck full of sawdust in a year. I currently dispose of this by hauling it to a landfill. I know of at least one fuel pellet manufacturer that will buy sawdust and planer shavings. Which would you rather me do with my granular wood waste?
I am curious: Have you considered making your own fuel pellets? I have seen a few DIY projects to compress sawdust and am wondering if it would be cost effective for you build/buy a machine for it, s’all.
If you do start a formal business, paying a highschool kid to run the machine and do simple sales tasks might be feasible. (It’s not always financially viable, I get it. It would be interesting to do the math on it though…)
(I have no skin in the related discussion. I just smelled a business opportunity and was curious.)
Edit: If you happen to be in the US and near Colorado, I would be willing to try and put a machine together myself, actually. At least, do a preliminary CAD sketch up and see what the raw, underlying cost would be. Can you be a hair more accurate about the volume of sawdust you generate?
I have briefly looked into doing it myself, and it’s just not there near-term.
Not only do you need a pellet press, you need a hammer mill to make sure the sawdust is the correct consistency, and then there’s apparently also an ideal moisture content. I use kiln dried lumber so there may need to be some adjustment there…it’s a few thousand dollars of equipment, I have no personal need for wood pellets, so it would just be easier to find someone who is already in that line of work to sell or even give my grit to. Starting a business and
I smelled a business opportunity as well; because when I make a trip to the dump to haul out sawdust and offcuts and things like that, I pay about $10. If I could sell the same amount of sawdust for $10, I’m $20 up. It would be a way to turn an expense into an income.
I can’t be that accurate about the sawdust I generate for a few reasons: 1. I’m still working as a hobbyist for the moment, sometimes I go weeks without building anything, sometimes I build two tables at once. 2. Sometimes I build a bookcase out of plywood and it generates very little dust, sometimes I mill my own rough sawn oak and a single table makes a garbage bin full of shavings. 3. Some of my equipment gets used outdoors and I don’t bother gathering the chips (yet). It ends up blown into the woods behind my property. Last year I hauled 2 mostly full 200 gallon garbage cans of dust, chips, shavings and small scrap to the landfill.
Yeah, I get it. Sometimes the juice ain’t worth the squeeze and it’s much easier to outsource some things.
Still though, just a preliminary search of the youtubes yielded a ton of sketchy pellet rigs just using some scrap metal and a repurposed electric motor. It would be an interesting side project, but a bit risky when it comes to time and profitablity.
(For others watching this conversation at home, pellet stoves can be extremely efficient. They burn hot and tend not to smoke as most of the soot is burned off. They average between 70-83% efficiency, which is excellent.)
I didnt know there was such a thing!
It looks like a reverse coffee grinder, turning ground back into whole bits! It isn’t what I’d call cheap, but it could be interesting for the right person to do as a side hustle.
They can be cheap if you can source scrap metal and can weld. The mechanics aren’t that difficult. The biggest drawback is time and efficiency as these kinds of operations need to happen at large scales to be profitable. (Machines in this class may be more prone to weird failures, I speculate.)
But yeah, even though we humans have a tendency to waste more than we should, we can be remarkably efficient when profits are involved. Converting trash to treasure has probably minted thousands of millionaires, now that I think about it.
I admire the welders so much. I’ve done a little welding, but I wouldn’t call any of it much better than passable. It really unlocks a whole new level of diy though.
I get a kick about watching some of these people turning various waste products and such into building materials or textiles and that is the stuff that gives me hope for the future. Lots of those operations seem to be those down on their luck in these odd places where these waste materials get pawned off, so I’m glad to see them eventually turned into something useful.
Never underestimate human ingenuity!
You’re talking about disposing of a waste product, though. They’re talking about growing trees specifically to grind into sawdust.
A good step would be to implement policy to encourage this and discourage growing trees specifically for burning
No objections to what you are doing here. I’m from a woodworking family and have made a good number of the pieces in my house. Wood is a wonderful building material.
You are likely not using the low quality wood from these replanted trees. People don’t want to use them for things they don’t see, let alone making something nice. It’s mainly Douglas fir.
They are cutting down the nice trees that you and the other plants and animals do love, nice old hardwoods, many times breaking laws to using technicalities to do so, and replacing them with these firs, and nothing but those firs, so all the plants and animals are gone, and they won’t have a complete ecosystem back for about 100 years…if they leave those trees standing once they’re big enough to harvest. See those subsidies again.
A pickup truck is a lot of sawdust. But it is not hundreds of acres a year. And it is a byproduct of your work, which I’ll assume is not legally shady or funded by taxpayers unaware of what they are paying for. You are making furniture so the wood will not be completely burned, so the carbon is still trapped in the wood, and if your furniture is of good quality, it will prevent a few generations of crap furniture being bought and trashed, so you look to be helping the carbon cycle more than the pellet industry.
Much like with single use plastics, I wouldn’t blame you for the situation. I fault the industries conning us out of our money on things that are hurting us. It is an industrial level problem to address. You are doing the best thing you can reasonably be expected to do, but the forestry people are not. Anyone trying to group you in with them is misguided or being deliberately antagonistic.
PS - Before posting I looked to see if you had any posts with your furniture. It does indeed look very nice! My family dealt primarily with oak furniture, and my teacher had us make many Shaker style pieces, so I recognized it immediately! Good for you, and I hope you have success and joy selling some. Anyone should be proud to display one of your tables.
You may be Captain Aggravated, but I hope I was able to express properly my beef if purely at large industry, not at people like you without causing any further aggravation! 😅
First of all I thank you for your kind words about my work. I didn’t really set out to become a shaker woodworker but I find myself attracted to the elegance that comes of simplicity. I plan on tackling some mission-style builds in the not too distant future as well.
I’ve been considering what values I’d want to run a furniture shop under, and here are a few I’ve got:
I don’t want to use exotic foreign timber in my work. What business do I have shipping birch, ebony and mahogany from the other side of the planet when I’m surrounded by oak, walnut and cherry? I live in a forest, my work need not involve a container ship and a trans-Atlantic voyage’s worth of bunker oil.
Even then I would like to use storm fallen or culled timber rather than farmed or clear cut. There’s a storm fallen white oak laying in my uncle’s lawn that I really need to haul off to the sawmill.
I would love to run my shop on rooftop solar and tell the power company to suck some of their coal ash back out of the Cape Fear.
And I would really like it if I could put my sawdust and small scraps to good use, even as stove fuel. I am aware that there are forests being torn down and the wood chipped and then sent by bulk cargo ship elsewhere in the world as “biomass fuel” because “lol not fossil fuels.” Which isn’t fucking great, to say the least. I would much rather find uses for what are otherwise waste products, like my sawdust.
I’m gonna play this a little closer to the chest but I also have similar ideas for exactly what furniture I build and how I build it.
It sounds like you have a nice holistic approach to what you do. That’s great to see.
You sound like you put a lot of care into your work and your local area. Best of luck to you and I’ll have to keep an eye out for more of your posts!
Thanks! I just put the last coat of varnish on a little table for my porch, I’ll probably post about it on [email protected] tomorrow.
Just subbed, so I’ll be on the lookout!
C.A. and I have been in some… eh… deep conversations before. Don’t let his name fool you though, as I genuinely believe he is a reasonable human albeit a little more expressive than some. ;)
Oh shit I’m starting to develop a reputation.
It’s all good. We just know not to talk about m****c vs I*****al measurement systems now, s’all.
(Just jokes!)
Hah, thank you! I sometimes avoid entering polarizing chats like this one, but since becoming the [email protected] spokesperson, these forest preserving things have become of much greater importance to me. Like I said, it’s wrong to try to pass blame on a handful of people making a few pieces of furniture a year when there are huge faceless companies doing the shady stuff on our dime.
Most fellow Lemmings have been pleasant, but when you go after something that can be seen as someone’s livelihood, it can get tense fast, so I just try to be calm and clear.
If nothing else, I got to see his furniture, which I truly did enjoy. I don’t get to browse as many of the small subs as I did on Reddit since most of my time goes to making posts and answering people’s owl related questions now, so it was a nice detour.