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Home > Archive > Mar 27, 2008

Good for the Globe, Beneficial for Building
By Cami Cox
Staff Writer
With its green approach to doing business, a local company has kept more than 3.5 million lineal feet of wood out of the landfills this past year, and Innovative Wood Concepts continues to help the environment as they produce quality wood products, cutting down waste but not new trees.
“We just got fed up with seeing all that lumber being wasted and tried to figure out what we could do to keep it from going to the dump,” IWC manager and part-owner Rod Anderson said.
About three years ago, Anderson, his father and brother – all partners in IWC – began utilizing leftover truss and construction lumber that would formerly have been sent to the dump, and they began turning that material into finger-jointed studs used for framing houses and other buildings. Using a method that is popular elsewhere in the country, the men began making studs without using new timber to do so.
Finger-jointed wood is more widely used outside of Utah than within the state, Anderson said, and finger-jointed wood is very popular in Texas, where IWC does quite a bit of business. It's not used as much locally, he said, because construction customers (those for whom structures are being built) aren't typically familiar with finger-jointed studs, and because these studs look different, people often shy away from using them.
“Their first thought is that it's an inferior product, when in fact it's a superior product,” Anderson said.
In making finger-jointed studs, short pieces of wood are joined together to make longer pieces. Jagged edges (or fingers) are machine-cut into the ends of the short wood, and the pieces are then pressed and glued together by machine and cut to size.
The more common practice for stud making is the use of un-jointed, solid sawn pieces of timber, but some experts say that the solid pieces are more likely to twist and warp over time. Finger-jointed wood is often found to be more durable and less likely to bow or warp, Anderson said. In performing his own tests at IWC, he found that when put under pressure, a solid piece of wood was more likely to break than a finger-jointed piece.
“The advantage to the finger joint is the fact that you've got the smaller pieces, and then it won't warp,” he said. “It won't twist and turn on you, and it's straighter – it's straighter to begin with, and it stays straighter. The fingers are just as strong, if not stronger.”
Finger-jointing is widely considered a green practice, because utilizing, rather than discarding, short pieces of wood enables more lumber to be used from each log. This cuts down on waste and also reduces the necessity of leveling new trees for traditional stud making.
Use of finger-jointed wood is an approved practice that is gaining popularity, according to information from the Forest Products Laboratory of the U.S. Forest Service.
Studs produced by IWC can be used interchangeably with solid sawn lumber studs, according to information from IWC, and no special approval is needed to use the studs in building. Nails can penetrate the jointed area of an IWC stud without reducing its capacity, and the local price of finger-jointed studs is comparable to that of regular studs. So consumers can request IWC studs with the knowledge that they'll be helping the environment and getting a stud that is comparable to, if not stronger than, any other, Anderson said.
The guys at IWC are striving to be as eco-conscious as possible in manufacturing their studs. Though finger jointing itself is considered to be a green practice because it reduces wood waste, IWC is taking that even further by using residual wood instead of new lumber, which many businesses don't do when making finger-jointed studs.
“A lot of them actually buy the material and run it through – not too many of them actually recycle the material anymore,” Anderson said.
IWC is taking its green practices further still. Trying to reduce waste as much as possible, they also utilize remnants from the stud making and rather than throwing that wood and residue away, manufacture it into wood pellets to be burned as fuel.
“That's been our whole idea from the start … to be able to recycle everything,” Anderson said.
Once the studs have been made, a machine grinds the wood residue and compresses it into small pellets. Those pellets are then bagged and sold to be burned in pellet stoves, which burn clean with low ash, Anderson said – also better for the environment.
For its efforts in being earth-friendly in manufacturing products, IWC is being featured in an upcoming issue of Texas Builder, the official publication of the Texas Association of Builders, and the company has also been featured on BuildingGreen.com.
To contact Innovative Wood Concepts, call 674-4555. IWC is located at 1087 E. Commerce Dr., in St. George.

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