Selling Dressers to the Electric Company?

I just read this article yesterday and found it very interesting, especially this part: "A wood dresser can be put in a chipper and the fragments then sold to energy companies, where they’re burned for electricity."

http://www.startribune.com/thrift-stores-make-more-revenue-being-less-choosy/301292401/

Does anyone have experience with anything similar to this?

I'm curious to see how much a wooden dresser or similar large piece of wooden furniture would scrap for. I get a lot of them and can remove the handles for brass most of the time but the pieces themselves have a lot of weight to them so a ton would add up very quickly.

Do you have a wood chipper? Is the gasoline to run the wood chipper going to cost more than the chipped dresser will sell for?

Originally Posted by TagSale

I'm curious to see how much a wooden dresser or similar large piece of wooden furniture would scrap for. I get a lot of them and can remove the handles for brass most of the time but the pieces themselves have a lot of weight to them so a ton would add up very quickly.

Yes, there is money in recycling wood fiber. However, like a lot of this type of stuff, it's a volume thing. For most of us small operators, the only significant return in processing wood items is in the avoided disposal costs. One way to get into this on a relatively smaller scale is to produce/ manufacture wood pellets. There is a lot of hobby-type equipment available.

I dream of such things about trash and the ways in which I could sell it to make money but sadly its only on a large enough scale I would need to find a winning lottery ticket in a pants pocket in a dryer full of change lol

I find and pickup a lot of CurbCo dressers and random furniture. I'm lucky that we have a few different used furniture consignment stores in my town. I do very well, if not better than selling my e-waste even at a 50/50 payout. I would cringe if I saw a nice oak dresser destroyed just for fire wood.

They had a wood gassification plant producing electricity to run the Verso paper mill in Bucksport Maine. They shut the generating plant down a couple of years after the mill closed. I guess it wasn't commercially viable after energy prices dropped. It's a shame really .....

The way it used to work was that local wood cutters provided pulp wood to the mill. These were professional loggers with maybe a quarter million invested in heavy equipment. It used to be that they would either burn or win row the brush but when a market opened up for wood chips they started chipping it instead. They would save up the piles and when there was enough to fill an eighteen wheeler dump truck they would ship it off to the gassification plant to be made into electricity. Wood is a pretty low grade fuel so it never really was a big money thing. It was more that it was eco friendly.

You could use municipal wood waste like demolished houses and furniture but it wouldn't be a clean process. The left over wood ash would be contaminated with lead & arsenic. Each load would have tested and hauled off to a special landfill.

Most of the wood pellets that we're using are brought in by the train car load out of Canada. They're made from saw dust from the lumber mills. It's a little tricky to get the moisture content just right. If they're too wet you can get a load that won't burn. If they're too dry you can run into combustion problems in the burn chamber of the pellet stove.

Sometimes the simple answer is best. When it's the dead of winter and you're out of firewood just start busting up the furniture.

I like to collect non ferrous in big brass planters.



I tell the guys I want the containers back so I have something to keep my scrap in. The last time I went the guy looks at me and starts laughing and tells me he is gonna get the bucket sooner or later.

Originally Posted by Scrappah

They had a wood gassification plant producing electricity to run the Verso paper mill in Bucksport Maine. They shut the generating plant down a couple of years after the mill closed. I guess it wasn't commercially viable after energy prices dropped. It's a shame really .....

The way it used to work was that local wood cutters provided pulp wood to the mill. These were professional loggers with maybe a quarter million invested in heavy equipment. It used to be that they would either burn or win row the brush but when a market opened up for wood chips they started chipping it instead. They would save up the piles and when there was enough to fill an eighteen wheeler dump truck they would ship it off to the gassification plant to be made into electricity. Wood is a pretty low grade fuel so it never really was a big money thing. It was more that it was eco friendly.

You could use municipal wood waste like demolished houses and furniture but it wouldn't be a clean process. The left over wood ash would be contaminated with lead & arsenic. Each load would have tested and hauled off to a special landfill.

Most of the wood pellets that we're using are brought in by the train car load out of Canada. They're made from saw dust from the lumber mills. It's a little tricky to get the moisture content just right. If they're too wet you can get a load that won't burn. If they're too dry you can run into combustion problems in the burn chamber of the pellet stove.

Sometimes the simple answer is best. When it's the dead of winter and you're out of firewood just start busting up the furniture.

Ahh, very good. I sometimes see big semi trucks loaded with wood chips and wonder... Now I get it, Wood Gasification. I did not know there were wood gasification plants in Maine. Again, very good.

It's pretty cool. It makes the best use of our forest resource.

The other thing we've got going is that there's a really good market for OSB. It's like chip board but the strands are oriented to give it more strength. With plywood at fifteen to twenty bucks a sheet and OSB at around ten bucks a sheet it's a popular choice for building on a budget.

The mills are busy and it's making good jobs for Mainers.

To give a price perspective; I recently got a price from one of the chipper crews. I had sold some pine timber from a plot that was hit with some hard wind and blown down. When the logger was done there was a lot of limbs, stumps and some odd shaped logs that wouldn't go in the trucks. A chipping contractor told us they could use most of it and would pay 50 cents per ton. It started raining that week and got too wet so I don't know what the turnout would have been.

Originally Posted by Pnutfarmer

To give a price perspective; I recently got a price from one of the chipper crews. I had sold some pine timber from a plot that was hit with some hard wind and blown down. When the logger was done there was a lot of limbs, stumps and some odd shaped logs that wouldn't go in the trucks. A chipping contractor told us they could use most of it and would pay 50 cents per ton. It started raining that week and got too wet so I don't know what the turnout would have been.

A quick Google search for softwood pellets shows a price of about $375.00 - $425.00 per ton. If you've got access to free wood, producing wood pellets could be a nice side line. Wood Pellet Pricing Comparison Chart | Southern Maine Renewable Fuels

Also, wood mulch seems to be going for $1.00 - $1.50 per cubic foot. I don't know how much weight this equates to, but the return would probably be less than with pellets. On the other hand, your processing would also be less.

There's no doubt that a guy mucking around to make wood pellets would have a hard time matching the quality of a large commercial operation. My understanding of the process is that one puts wood chips through a hammer mill to get the finer sawdust and from there to pellets. A bit of experimentation should eventually get you to a usable product. Once you have a product, price it right and buyers will come. Energy and equipment costs may be an issue, but if you can get your material input for free this might be a viable retirement project.

I also agree that pellets can't compete with cord wood on an economic basis. The people I've talked to that use them do it for the convenience. There's less mess and the stoves can be unattended for longer.

Around here, one of the advantages of selling firewood from your property is that if you reach a certain income threshold, your property taxes go from residential to a lower agricultural rate.

It really is an interesting idea. Have a small homebrew operation and be able to provide for yourself. There's the convenience factor and the pellet stoves are so efficient that their emissions are pretty low.

There was another thing called Bio-blocks that showed up on the market here about four or five years ago. It's pretty much the same as a pellet except that it's about the size of a brick and can be burned in a wood stove.

The thing with pellets and such is that they might require more energy to produce than they yield in heat. You have to figure the fuel used for the chain saw, maybe a tractor of some kind, a truck, a chipper, a hammer mill, a pellet press, and so on. After you ran the numbers it would probably show a net energy loss.

The thing about wood is that it's a low grade fuel. For most people it's too much like work. It's especially so with the old timers. There comes a point .... they've processed their own firewood for thirty or forty years and they just get tired. They run up to Home Depot and buy a pellet stove. They still have to fill the hopper on the back of the stove once a day with pellets but that's tolerable.

Pellets aren't a bad thing but there are better options. There's a super insulated passive solar home in the neighborhood that heats itself to at least 50 degrees on the coldest winter days. You can pretty much heat it with a match.

Heat pumps seem to be the currently emerging thing here. The few people that i've talked to who have them are pretty happy. If there was ever a time and a place to jump in this might be it. Might turn out to be that you could make a six figure income with sales & service if it catches on.

( Sorry for the thread drift. )

Lots, actually most, property's here in NZ have heatpumps. There's several places that fit them in my town and a few 'work from home' guys who do it as a sideline.
What I like about them the most is that they are easy to scrap down and give you a good $ return, NZ $50 or more.
I pay a 'line charge' $30- $40 per month and NZ$0.15 cents a unit (US$0.10 cents) for electricity.

Often if people have a log burner for heating, it has a 'wetback' which heats up the hot water too.