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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?
there is a plant near me that has a gasefier...they buy plastic and it turns it into energy....can't see why this might be any different
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.
Its firewood. Its nice that they have the option to burn it properly and make electricity from it.
But one dresser or such is not going to make you any money.
Depending on where you are (local rules) you could chop it up and sell it as firewood, people do that with old broken pallets here, and sacks of pinecones. ($5-$7 a sackfull).
You make your money by adding value to the item, that's what most of scrap metal is about really, knowing what something is, what its about and what you can turn it into. Hint ($$)
Selling your Ferrous metal firsts a good idea, it takes up most of the space and as long as its got not much stuck to it, it goes as 'Lightgauge' or Heavy Melting Steel. Can't go wrong there.
Save up some nonferrous and check here at SMF as to what its classed as, get 10lbs or such of each separated and take it to a yard to sell it. This amounts good for your first learning trip to the buyers.
Its easy to see and pick thru, if any things wrong it won't cost you much.
Take it to a well known corporate owned yard, they don't have time to clean down the metal that comes in (mostly) so its in yours and theirs intrests that you know how to clean your metal down and to get the best prices for it.
They will probably give you a few hints on what to do and what to look out for in the metal.
Go there when its quiet, mornings are good.
Have a rough idea on what its worth and what your metal weighs.
Get a few more posts in and post some good pictures of what you have.
Once you start selling properly, you will be wanting to sell nonferrous by the 20kg (44Lbs) $100 mark or close.
I use plastic paint pails, by the time its full its worth something, except for Aluminium, you will want at least 100Lbs of that.
Ali has at least 3 grades you sell by, Extrusion, Cast Ali, Domestic Ali. Ali cans.
Give us a idea of what you are scrapping down too, everything's got things to look out for. I learnt something quite important yesterday and I have been doing scrapmetal for over a decade, maybe two.
After edit.
Be safe, wear gloves and protect your wrists. Wear safety glasses when cleaning things down. If you are hammering or cutting wear ear protection too. Wear good safety boots with ankle support and preferably steel toe caps.
Be carefully, don't scrap around cars or near where things can get broken, this is important, one wrong move can cost you $$$ and once it has, you will never get that money back.
. Ceramic or Ferrite and safety glass do not go together at all.
Same with finding scrap, if you get told about some, get onto of right away, if you linger, it may not be there when you get back.
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?
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by TagSale
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.
http://www.indianproduct.com/images/...or/b14247a.jpg
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scrappah
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.
so 50 tons would be $25........I guess?
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 FuelsQuote:
Originally Posted by Pnutfarmer
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.
It's hard to say. I looked into the startup costs for pellet production a few years ago when home heating oil was at it's peak. There's a lot to it. You've got to have a ready source of sawdust ( not wood chips ) like what you would get from a sawmill.
If you had to process softwood from logs down to sawdust it would require more energy to make them than they gave off in heat energy.The other issue you run into is that you need a chemical binder like corn starch or potato starch to hold the sawdust fibers in a pellet shape. An operation of any size would likely be having to buy tons of starch every year.
IMO ... timing is everything. A few years ago oil was at it's peak. People were upset over the cost and looking for alternative heat sources. The mills looked in their back yard and thought to themselves that this is the perfect time to make something useful out of their waste product. They already had 20 mil invested in wood processing equipment and an established distribution network. It was really nothing to spend a few mil more on machinery and launch a new product line.
It would be really hard to build even a small pellet operation from the ground up. You might not be able to compete with the economy of scale and the timing for a new venture is off.
There are a few ways of capitalizing on waste softwood that i've found to work pretty well over the years.
The First: It doesn't take a big investment in equipment to get into caretaking & property maintenance. All you need is a good chainsaw & a pickup truck. Property owners have dead trees & blow downs they want cleared off their property. The tree branches aren't hard to get rid of. The logs are a pain to get rid of but if you heat with wood the customer will literally pay you 40.00 - 120.00 $/hr to cut the logs to stove length and haul them off site to your house.
Once they're back at your shop you run them through a log splitter and either use the wood for your own purposes -or- sell softwood firewood for 110.00 to 175.00 $ per cord. If you sell it, you have to pay income tax which kinda sucks but if you use that money to buy brand new equipment to work with every year or two it's tax free income.
Second: They say that a penny saved is a penny earned. A cord of softwood has about the same heat energy as 90 gallons of home heating oil. When i ran a cost comparison a few years ago my costs for softwood were 75 cents per MBH vs. fuel oil at 21.50 USD per MBH. Even in the coldest winter we're only using five gallons of fuel oil per week. Some of the neighbors are spending 300.00 - 500.00 USD per month to heat with oil.
The Third Way: Network with the wood cutters in the area. The ones that are doing it full time have far more logs than they could ever need or want. Just let them know that it would be okay to drop them at your place if they are working in the area. It makes it so much easier for them and you get free wood. I've already processed 9 cord of what came in this spring. It's likely they will drop another two wheeler loads before they're done working in the neighborhood.
It's A LOT OF WORK but it's a comfort to know that you've got your heat taken care of next winter. :)
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.
< sigh> The wetbacks aren't all that common here. It's too bad, because with a family of four at least half of your domestic energy needs are for hot water.
Figure that the wood stove is already running ... why not use it to make hot water ? (It saves a lot on the electric or fuel bill.)
I built my system about ten years ago. The total cost was under a 100.00 USD
I salvaged an 80 gallon stone lined water heater from the municipal metals pile. I pulled the upper and lower heating elements and used those tank taps as the inlet and outlet for the heat exchanger. I built the heat exchanger out of 3/4 copper pipe & fittings then mounted it about 8" away from the outside of the stove.
The stove throws off heat. The heat exchanger takes that heat and heats the water inside. That starts a thermosiphon. As the heated water travels to the upper fitting on the tank it draws in colder water from the bottom of the tank. Easy peezy. Runs all day and by early evening we've got a tank full of 140 deg F. hot water. No pumps or moving parts so the system should probably last at least 40 years.
The main reason that the wetbacks have a reputation for overheating the water and making steam is because people don't use common sense when they're building them. If they would just set them up for moderate gain there would never be a problem.
I know thrift stores sell stained, ripped and un wanted clothing so if they had an outlet to get rid of bulky wood items they get it seems like a win win for both!
here is the OP's link Thrift stores make more revenue being less choosy - StarTribune.com
I will repeat <sigh>. As much as half my electric bill comes from my electric water heater.
I did pick two nice solar water heater panels. Pretty big ones. (8' x 4'). I originally picked them up for the sheet copper but soon realized these can have much more value if used for their intended purpose. This specific system is a closed loop system. It heats a type of antifreeze liquid and moves through coils in the water tank, heating the water around the coils. But I forgot the accompanying water tank..