The construction industry generates over 40 percent of global waste, with wood accounting for a significant portion of the disposed C&D materials. Most waste goes into landfills – why? Because waste disposal is expensive, manually damanding work and there just aren’t enough recycling or biomass production facilities to handle all the waste. Some recycling companies have to haul their waste to another state to be processed. These challenges facing the wood recycling industry are enticing industry players to explore innovative ways of managing the wood recycling issue.
“Since post-World War II, traditional wood recycling has included creating a highly reprocessed product such as panel board, mulch and biomass fuel for energy generation,” said Jimmy Mitchell, national sustainability manager at Skanska USA Building, which specializes in recycling and circularity. “In recent years, the industry has been exploring getting back to things our grandparents and older generations would have done with C&D wood, reusing it either as originally intended or in a less processed form. Two movements in the industry include regenerative design and construction and finding the best use of C&D materials.”
When it comes to regenerative construction, imagine a new building is being built or renovated, and in the process of completing the project, there is less material in the landfill than if the project was not built – this is what Skanska accomplished in building the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design at Georgia Tech. The team discovered 28 examples of waste materials that could skip the landfill and be reused in the new build. On the C&D waste side of executing the project, Skanska source separated the trash and studied what waste materials would result in each scope item. The result was a high level of recycled material, including wood, with a small percentage of hard-to-recycle products going to the landfill. In the end, the weight of the reused material that wasn’t landfilled exceeded the weight of material sent to the landfill.
The project exemplifies the innovative use of C&D waste, but it is not without its challenges. “There have been advances in products that automate the process to remove foreign objects like nails from C&D wood. While it is important to quickly remove foreign objects from C&D wood in a fast and efficient manner, hitting metal in processing wood damages expensive equipment and in the best case results in the need to replace blades,” Mitchell says.
He further explained that on a broader level, there have been strides toward a circular process when products are designed and built so at the end of their first use life, they can be reused again or lightly remanufactured circularly.
“These new circular products will also save costs in the future,” Mitchell said. “When you take a step back, it is hard to believe that the industry traditionally disposes of 5 to 15 percent of material as a waste factor in constructing a project, and at the end of an 8 to 50 year period, 100 percent of this expensive material is guaranteed to cost us more money to throw it away. Designing and constructing with circularity in mind will contribute to a circular economy.”
According to Todd Thomas, founder and chief executive officer at Woodchuck, the vast majority of construction wood waste goes to landfills. There is, however, growing pressure for change coming from end users.
“Big enterprise clients like Amazon, Ford and IKEA are putting pressure on their contractors to improve sustainability, reduce landfill use and provide tracking and reporting on these efforts,” Thomas said.
Woodchuck uses AI image recognition to simplify waste management and diversion. The company identifies, diverts, sorts and segregates wood and other valuable materials from waste streams and ensures its highest and best use across remanufacturing, bioenergy, and carbon removal. Woodchuck is a year-old start-up addressing the demand for more diverse forms of biomass so energy companies produce renewable energy through their AI-powered platform.
Specifically, the Woodchuck.AI platform tracks diverted waste from origin to final dispensation, generating customizable sustainability reports. It validates total tonnage diverted, CO2 avoided, CO2 generated in transportation, net CO2 avoided, tonnage delivered to remanufacturing, bioenergy, and total BTUs of clean energy produced.
“The challenge and the opportunity is that this space is currently devoid of technology; it’s manual, labor intensive, inefficient, and expensive. Most companies view sustainability as an expense,” Thomas said. “The challenge is that wood is not homogeneous. The source, quality and cleanliness of wood can vary considerably. The way wood is collected can also vary considerably, further impacting quality and cleanliness. This impacts the potential highest and best use of the wood.”
What’s more, wood with permanent contaminants like oil-based paints, preservatives, and fire retardant has limited additional uses – primarily for use in industrial products like solidifier, friction, and sealant. Clean wood, on the other hand, has many potential uses and can be very valuable.
As Thomas explained, the highest quality wood can be reused in its current form in new projects. Hard woods, beams and 2x4s can be reused and clean wood can be processed into biomass for use in remanufacturing (i.e., turning recycled wood into new particle board or press board). Wood that isn’t clean enough for remanufacturing can often be used for bioenergy production.
“There are many very exciting new technologies in bioenergy that encompass carbon capture – utilizing woody biomass to generate energy and at the same time capturing the carbon so that it is not released into the atmosphere,” Thomas said. “The value of high quality recycled wood can be 10x that of low quality wood. The capacity to identify, divert, sort and segregate wood from the waste stream is very valuable. The challenge is that this space is currently devoid of technology.”
Mark Whitley, founder and chief executive officer of Whits Services Corporation, agreed that one of the biggest challenges of recycling wood is contamination. “Wood from C&D sites are regularly received combined with such things as concrete, drywall, and metal,” Whitley said. Construction wood often arrives with complex chemical histories – paint residues, varnish treatments and unknown surface coatings create serious recycling barriers. Some sorting technologies within the recycling industry can now detect and separate wood types with remarkable precision.
Moving forward, Thomas thinks the C&D wood recycling industry will continue to involve growing pressure from large enterprise players to increase and improve sustainable options, increase waste diversion and recycling, reduce landfill usage, and the ability to track, report and validate the results of these efforts.
“Sustainability done well should not add costs, it should reduce cost by diverting valuable materials from waste streams and reusing them to capture more of their value,” Thomas said.
Mitchell added that one area of industry focus regarding wood recycling is the impact on carbon emissions. Wood plays a key role as in the process of making lumber, tree converts carbon dioxide into oxygen and wood fiber is made of carbon. This carbon is sequestered in the wood until it gets released at the end of its life through either burning for power generation or decomposing in a landfill.
“The industry will evolve to include materials that not only lower emissions but sequester it,” Mitchell says. “Again, imagine if we construct a building and some of the new products we purchase sequester carbon in the process of making them and others emit carbon. We will strive to industrialize this so that the net effect is balanced.
Published March 2025