Sustainability
The day we stopped calling it waste wood
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I can date it, which is unusual for a change in how a company thinks. It was a Tuesday in October 2014 and the invoice was for $1,842.
That was the month's tipping fee. Eleven roll-offs of what our own job sheets called waste wood — broken pallets, stringer ends, offcuts — driven to a landfill twenty-two miles away and buried. We had been paid to collect most of it, and then paid again to get rid of it.
What made it absurd rather than merely expensive is that the same week we bought 2,400 board feet of replacement deck boards from a mill in Wyoming. We were burying lumber on Tuesday and buying lumber on Thursday.
The words on a job sheet decide what happens to the thing. Call it waste and it goes in a hole. Call it stock and somebody finds a buyer.
What actually changed
The honest answer is: not much technology, and a great deal of sorting. We did not buy a machine that solved it. We changed four things, and three of them were about where people stood.
- We moved the sort decision forward. Previously a pallet was graded once, at the repair line. Now it is graded at the gate, when it comes off the trailer, by somebody whose entire job is that decision.
- We separated 'broken' into four outcomes rather than one: repairable, remanufacturable, lumber-recoverable and fibre. Those are four different piles and four different buyers.
- We hired a de-nailer. One person, full time, pulling nails out of recovered boards. It sounds like a step backwards. It is the most profitable role in the building per dollar of wage.
- We found the fibre buyer before we needed one. Landscape mulch is a real market in Colorado with real seasonal demand. We signed the offtake agreement before we bought the grinder, not after.
The numbers, then and now
| FY2014 | Last full year | |
|---|---|---|
| Cores processed | 71,000 | 186,000 |
| Reused after inspection only | 38% | 46% |
| Repaired | 24% | 31% |
| Remanufactured | 3% | 12% |
| Lumber recovered for resale | 2% | 8% |
| Ground to fibre | 9% | 3% |
| Landfilled | 24% | 0% |
| Annual tipping fees | $21,100 | $0 |
| Replacement lumber bought in | 31,000 bf | 4,200 bf |
Look at the last two rows together, because that is where the money is. We did not stop landfilling by finding somewhere else to put the wood. We stopped by using it, which simultaneously removed a cost and removed a purchase.
The part that was harder than it sounds
Grinding is easy to scale and easy to photograph. Every recycler that wants a sustainability page can buy a grinder and put a video of it on the internet. The difficult, unglamorous, genuinely circular work is upstream of the grinder: it is the sorting that keeps wood out of it.
Our fibre percentage went down from 9% to 3% over that decade, and that is the number I am proudest of. It means fewer pallets are being destroyed to make a product worth fifty-five cents when they could have been repaired into a product worth nine dollars.
What it cost
About $240,000 over four years: a de-nailing station, a second sort bay, the grinder, a magnet, and roughly eighteen months of running a fibre line at a loss while we learned how to screen it properly. We financed it with the tipping fees we stopped paying, which took a little over three years.
I am not going to pretend it was an ethical decision that happened to pay. It was a commercial decision that happened to be right. The two things pointing the same way is what has kept it in place through two recessions and a lumber spike, and I would trust that far more than I would trust a policy.