Marshall Erickson

1-27-2025

There is huge potential for wood waste to transform a community for the better.  Reducing disposal costs, new products, reusing it across the community, addressing critical environmental challenges, and increasing economic development, to name a few.

Today, wood waste is treated as a waste product we need to get rid of.  Forestry and waste management focus on volume minimization.  Chip or grind it. Burn it or let it decompose. Transport it and let others worry about it.  While wood waste can be repurposed and used, collaboration and action are limited.

Capturing Wood Waste’s potential requires a new mindset and approach. 

New Mindset

First, we must think of it as an asset we can leverage rather than a cost-sucking liability.  When this happens, our minds change.  Wow, wood waste can generate heat and electricity, be made into usable products like biochar, biogas, biofuels, and more. We can reduce costs and monetize it.  How do we look at the possibilities? Who benefits? Who can help? How do we work together to make it happen? 

Secondly, all stakeholders must accept and commit to the fact it’s a problem and opportunity affecting all of us, and we must work together.

New Approach

This new mindset opens the door to a new, collaborative, systemic approach to wood waste utilization. Multi-stakeholder engagement coordinating wood waste source, production and use generating operations, economic, and environmental benefit throughout a community.  By working together across the utilization cycle, adding new wood derived products, educating the community on new product uses, and pricing product to drive large scale use, we solve the wood waste problem.

Do it right, and we reuse a lot of wood waste in ways that make operations and financial sense.