Our local sawmill (Norbury Wood products - www.norburywood.org.uk) had it's annual open day last weekend, so I went along to see what they were up to. This is a spin-off from Surrey Council, now part of Surrey Wildlife Trust, that is sustainably managing some local woodland and working as a small cash generator for the charity by producing high quality signage and garden furniture, lot's of information on their website, so I won't dwell on it here.
However, from an energy / efficiency point of view it is a well thought out setup.
The nature of their business, where they are processing raw felled trees into meaningful product means that there is a lot of wood wastage on site,but they deal with this intelligently.
They are working with a local woodsman who produces charcoal, so some of the waste naturally services his requirements for raw material to go into his charcoal burners - waste from one business becomes raw material for another.
The other, more interesting aspect of what they do is to use a lot of their wastage to fuel a wood burning boiler which services the kilns they use to treat and dry green timber before manufacturing from it. Naturally, green timber would need to sit for a number of years before it was dry enough to work as processed wood for furniture & the like, so to speed up this process to a number of months, the sawmill stores the wood they want to work in kilns, fed by this boiler, which accelerate the drying time. Again an example of their business gaining from intelligent usage of their waste product. The running costs for these kilns must be close to Nil, and compared to waste removal costs are certainly more carbon friendly.
They also process their sawdust wastage, which is used as bedding by a local farmer for his livestock.
So apart from being an interesting day seeing all the big machinery at work, it's nice to see a business thinking through it's processes to be as eco friendly as is reasonable. Very good.
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