Heating with magazines

BuildingGreen recently cleared out about 75 shelf-feet of periodicals -- Architecture and PanelWorld and Ecological Restoration and Mold and Moisture Management and lots more. The recycling area outside the office was getting overcrowded with them and we still had more to remove. Then I remembered that our neighbor, Steve Benson, at J.S Benson Woodworking & Design, had told me he could use paper in his briquetter.

I gave Steve a call, and he happily accepted our old magazines. The next day he brought over a brown, nice-smelling cylinder about two-inches long and an inch across, made partly out of our magazines. He also sent the photos above, showing magazines in his heavy-duty shredder, then all chewed up along with wood scraps in the hopper of his briquet-maker, then the finished briquets.

Steve has an old building that has been costing a lot to heat, and he has a lot of wood scraps as a by-product of making gorgeous windows and doors. He realized he could be heating with those scraps, and got hold of the equipment to do it -- the shredder, the briquetter, and a massive, clean-burning wood furnace. He got some good advice, but he figured out a lot of it on his own. This is great, but it doesn't end there. He's planning to use a wood gasifier hooked up to a diesel flatbed truck as his company's delivery vehicle, and to set up a series of mid-sized generators, also powered with wood gas, to power his shop and to sell to the grid. A blacksmith, another neighbor of ours, is interested in using the charcoal that will result from the gasification process to heat his forge. And the filters that will capture crud that would otherwise be airborne can be fed into the briquetter and burned up in the furnace.

Steve is going for LEED EB Silver certification, although his old mill building is far from the typical LEED candidate, and his on-site power and innovative systems will help him get there. He says he'd rather spend some money and effort on LEED certification than buy $20,000 worth of ads in glossy architectural magazines. He expects to get a lot of positive attention, and he's having a blast figuring out all this stuff. It's great to be able to feed our neighbor's furnace with our unwanted magazines, but I wouldn't even have known about the goings on over there if one of Steve's employees hadn't mentioned some of it to me. It makes me wonder what else is happening, under the radar, as people put their ingenuity to work solving energy problems and making their buildings work better. Do you know of anything cool? Write a comment and let everybody know about it.