Hardwood Floors October/November 2024

By Libby White Johnston

There are several different ways to put wood residuals back into play. We asked some wood floor manufacturers to take us inside their facilities and share what happens with these by-products. CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE RESIDUALS LEFT OVER FROM THE PROCESS AT YOUR PLANT? Tom Edwards, CFO of

Reliance Hardwood Flooring: During the process of manufacturing wood flooring, lumber is planed and ripped and that goes into a dust system. The bigger pieces go into a grinder, then

Tom Edwards

the small particles go into a dust collector, which goes out into either a trailer or a silo. When the machines are running, it’s creating everything from a fine shaving to a big strip of wood, so those two things get separated. We make four to five truckloads of dust a day. Doug Fikes, plant manager of Buchanan Hardwood Flooring: Dust, fuel for hog machinery, and shavings. All of the waste is

mulched/ground up and goes from there into the silos. There are about 250 to 300 tons each week. Cameron Merrick, director of operations for Merrick Hardwoods: When we manufacture hardwood flooring, we produce a waste stream of hardwood sawdust that is collected throughout the day.

Doug Fikes

WHAT DOES YOUR COMPANY DO WITH THESE AFTER THE FACT? Edwards: We use part of our waste to heat our kilns while drying green

Fikes: It goes into a big silo, and we feed our boiler for fuel to make steam with it for the dry kilns to dry our lumber. The excess material we have left over goes to pellet and wood flour mills. Merrick: We use this hardwood

lumber. Then we produce about 75 tons of bricks per week, and we make pet bedding, which is lighter, and about 50 tons of that per week. We just started making the bricks this year, and those can be used in outdoor firepits, camping, home stoves, fireplaces, and anything that would use a wood-burning product to start a fire.

Cameron Merrick

sawdust to produce wood pellets for the heating and grilling market.

the magazine of the national wood flooring association

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