Grand Rapids firm has alternative fuel solution for woodworking companies

By: Deborah Johnson Wood

Each year, furniture manufacturers, cabinet makers and architectural millwork companies generate tons of sawdust and wood chips as waste. Most companies pay to haul away, and that’s expensive; sawdust fills dump trucks by volume not weight, meaning more trips and more cost.

But what if companies could turn the waste into wood briquettes that would heat the factory? What if a business could buy the wood waste and make briquettes for the consumer market?

Enter Grand Rapids-based Stiles Machinery. Stiles recently became the first and only U.S. sales and distribution point for wood briquette presses developed by Denmark-based C. F. Nielsen. Stiles introduced the equipment last month at the International Woodworking Fair in Atlanta, Ga.

“For years we’ve sold the machinery that creates the wood waste. We can now offer a way to turn that waste into something that has a greater value than the waste itself,” says Michael Jungblut, Stiles spokesperson.

The presses compact sawdust and chips into easily transported briquettes that take up one-fourth the space of an equal weight of sawdust. The small hydraulic presses make a two-inch diameter, half-inch long briquette (think hockey puck). Larger mechanical presses make a four-inch diameter briquette of nearly any length that can be used in a 600 horse power factory boiler or cut down for a home wood burner.

Presses that process 200 pounds of waste an hour run about $75,000. Units that process 4,000 pounds an hour come in at $450,000.

Heat savings vary depending on the current heat source—propane, fuel oil, or natural gas—and the BTUs required.

“Burning wood waste as fuel increases a woodworking company’s sustainability tremendously,” Jungblut says, “even if it’s just offsetting a portion of their heating bill.”

Source: Michael Jungblut, Stiles Machinery

Deborah Johnson Wood is development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].