Posted on 03/03/2008 2:53:01 AM PST by BGHater
Home Building Drops, And Wood Waste, Too; The Manure substitute
Ernie Johnson figured $100-a-barrel oil was bound to happen someday. But the 58-year-old businessman Missoula, Mont., never thought he'd see sawdust at $100 a ton.
The price of sawdust has soared since 2006, up from about $25 a ton to more than $100 in some markets. Blame the housing slump: Fewer new homes mean fewer trees cut for use in construction, which leads to less sawdust and other wood waste, driving up the price.
"I've never seen sawdust so hard to find. We're having to go 400 miles to get it," says Mr. Johnson, the president of Johnson Brothers Contracting, which sells everything from chopped bark for landscapers to wood chips for pulp mills.
Sawdust may seem like a lowly commodity, but it is widely used in today's economy. Farms use sawdust and wood shavings as cozy and clean bedding for horses and chickens. Particle-board makers devour it by the boxcar to fashion a cheap building material. Auto-parts manufacturers blend a finely pulverized sawdust called "wood flour" with plastic polymers to make a lightweight material to cover steering wheels and dashboards.
The shortage of sawdust and wood shavings has boosted the cost of boarding horses at the Lazy E Ranch in Guthrie, Okla. Two years ago, the Lazy E paid $950 per load of wood shavings for its horse stalls. Last month, Butch Wise, who manages the ranch, paid $2,650 a load. The ranch needs three loads a week.
"You'd think sawdust would be in plentiful and cheap supply, but it's not," he says.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Good. I hope concrete comes down as well.
Building materials are ridiculously priced.
This is all too true. For the second year in a row, I'll be postponing my tree harvest.
This is also bad news for the James Brown Impersonator industry. People don’t realize how much sawdust it takes to get through a jammin’ “I Feel Good”.
Buy rice hulls. California has a surplus ad they are better for the animals less problems with bugs and infection.
So much for pellet stoves being the latest magic bullet in home heating. Corn seemed like a good idea for a bit until pellets got good momentum with low pricing and an endless supply of cheap fuel.
Are we at peak sawdust?
Sawdust used to be free 25 years ago.
Framing and trimming out a new basement for a customer... :O)
“Buy rice hulls. California has a surplus ad they are better for the animals less problems with bugs and infection.”
A good idea for certain uses on the farms. But rice hulls contain large quantities of silicon ... not appropriate for a replacement of sawdust in industrial uses.
We are so doomed. Oh, wait...it’s an election year. Everything sucks more than usual. Everything is too expensive and we’re running out of everything!
But when The Beast is in charge, miraculously, there will be no sawdust shortage and there will be free sawdust for all!
And a big reason for that is all the stuff we are ‘donating’ to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, sorry to say.
I presume that at $100 a ton, that’s still not enough to justify chopping down unusable trees and simple running them through a grinder for sawdust?
You mean like old christmas trees that most areas just use to create mulch.
Yes would not work well in particle boards but will help the farmers. South Dakota pig farmers buy tons of it and there are many more tons in the Gold Valley.
Also I hear there is an entrepenuer up tha way working on a way to solve the silcon issue for particle board, something called MDF.
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