Arborist waste chips to heat

I started my career as an arborist, I wanted an active career that engaged my interest in trees and forests. With a team of arborists, trucks and wood chippers, we generated hundreds of tonnes of low value waste. When Confederation College began their journey to wood heating, we jumped on board as a partner and began developing our process.

The problem with arborist chips is that the consistency is poor, the moisture content is high and the volumes available are small and sporadic. An arborist will remove a tree and immediately put it through a chipper then right away need somewhere to dump the chips. If there isn’t a reliable customer or facility in the area, they resort to dumping at landfills, farms, peoples back yards etc. In most cases, the arborists receive no value from dumping the chips and in many cases, dumping comes with a fee. All the while, we’re heating our buildings all year with fossil fuels and setting carbon reduction targets…….

Our site is unique in Ontario, maybe Canada, since we take all of our waste chips and process them into a higher value heating fuel that will meet the specifications of P45 W30 as described in ISO 17225:4. Here’s a video that describes the entire process:

This facility has been running smoothly for years and allows Confederation College to turn off its gas boilers for most of the winter thereby reducing their carbon emissions immensely. Along with their other initiatives, Confederation College is a national leader in Carbon reduction.

There is an immense amount of experience that has gone into this project as a result of all the trial and error through development. If we were to start from scratch, we would have made some changes in design and equipment but what we have now works very well and very consistently.

Please reach out if you’d like to learn how you may be able to recreate a similar process in your area.