What is wood waste?
Wood waste is the end-of-life of wood products, trees, or some combination of both. Wood waste is an ever growing problem across the world, especially in Alberta, where tipping fees for wood can range up to $150/ton, and that’s not even including transportation and handling!
Why is it a problem?
Trees spend their lives absorbing the carbon dioxide that we exhale and emitting oxygen for us to breathe. The carbon stays sequestered into the tree for the remainder of it’s life. Once the tree dies, it begins to release the carbon that it spent its life accumulating back into the world.
Additional problems are not just associated with wood waste; waste in general is becoming a problem in society. Living in a place with a population density as sparse as Canada, it’s difficult to see that there are problems with landfills filling up, but new regulations are becoming stricture with the number of landfills allowed and the volume threshold of each landfill.
What is a solution?
Waste less! We learned it in elementary: reduce, reuse, and recycle! If you have been following our blog you know that wood waste is an ideal feedstock for the Ulysses slow pyrolysis system. Once fed into the unit, wood waste is placed into a chamber where it will be thermally treated until all the gas and liquid fractions are pushed out of the material and what remains is the carbon that the trees have spent their lives absorbing, but it is now in an inert state called char (or biochar). In this state, the carbon structure will stay inert (in solid form) for centuries.
For more information about wood waste recycling please visit the AWWRA website!