Becoming a Piece of the "Green Puzzle"

The good side of our business growing and doing so well is:
- that we are growing and doing very well.

The bad side is: 
- we are producing a lot of waste! We try to limit waste in every possible way but the reality is that you cannot eliminate it completely. A big part of our growing pains is the waste we are producing.
We are  producing about 800 kg of woodworking waste per week (yes, that's right!) Previously it was being hauled off by one of the commercial garbage pick -up  companies and taken to the municipal garbage dump.

For months now, we have been looking for ways to ensure that we lessen the impact of our operations on the environment. And that is when we came upon Cloverdale Fuels. 
Their primary business revolves around the transport, disposal and sale of wood by-products. These products include: sawdust, shavings, hogged fuel, bark mulch, bark nuggets, mill-ends, wood-chips, pulp-chips, and pole-peelings. And just recently Cloverdale Fuels partnered up with the UBC Bioenergy Research & Demonstration Facility. This facility  is the first demonstration of its kind in the world of a community-scale heat and power system fuelled by biomass. The system provides heat and power to The University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus. 

Energy produced and emissions reduced
In Thermal Mode (heat only), the facility generates up to 20,000 pounds per hour of steam, approximately 25 per cent of UBC’s base requirement. It eliminates 9,000 tonnes of UBC’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), the equivalent to taking 1,882 cars off the road each year.

In Demonstration Mode (combined power and heat), the system generates approximately two megawatts of electricity, enough to power the nearby 1,600-bed Marine Drive Student Residence. It also produces 9,600 pounds per hour of steam, approximately 12 per cent of UBC’s base requirement. It reduces UBC’s GHGs by 5,000 tonnes per year, equivalent to removing 1,000 cars from the road each year. 

We are proud to be a small part in the bigger scheme of going green.