WASTE MAKES WOOD

In a new factory at the outskirts of Venlo, The Netherlands, close to the border with Germany, an elevator dumps a large bag of hay into a giant mixer. The dried grass is absorbed in a slowly turning brown slurry containing urban waste—mostly recycled paper and packaging. Via a conveyor belt, the slurry disappears through a series of filters in a press and an oven. Some 10 minutes later a machine spits out 120 x 305 cm board panels that look exactly like the hardboard sheets available in any hardware store.

The grass in the waste mix comes from the one thousand hectares of grassland around the runways of Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. The airport needs to regularly cut the grass to prevent birds that endanger air traffic from nesting. Schiphol buys the panels from ECOR (Environmental Core Materials), the American company that built the factory in Venlo and they are used for construction at the airport. The process ensures that the CO2 stored in the grass will not be released. ECOR will also process trash from the terminals—supporting Schiphol’s ambition to be a waste-free airport by 2030.​

The collaboration between ECOR and Schiphol offers an inspiring example of the emerging sustainable circular economy. The production of the ECOR panels only requires agricultural or urban waste, water—that is continuously recycled—, heat and pressure. The panels can replace—often at lower costs—particle board, plywood and other construction materials that contain lots of fossil fuel-based toxins. 

ECOR panels do not include any poisonous manmade chemicals and can be sustainably recycled. The innovation saves trees, and reduces the use of fossil fuels, carbon emissions and environmental pollution as it transforms waste from an expensive liability into a valuable raw material that is locally available. “In my 35 years working at the world’s largest furniture retailer I have seen many new products and material developments but nothing as revolutionary as ECOR”, says Rene Hausler, former CEO of IKEA in the US, Sweden and Switzerland.

The ECOR invention can be replicated everywhere there is waste and a need for building materials. Nature recently published a study showing that for each person on the planet the weight of newly ‘manmade stuff’ (roads, houses, coffee mugs, smart phones, etc.) manufactured each week equals their body weight. Most of that stuff will end up as waste. “There is a never-ending supply of raw material for our panels,” says Jay Potter ECOR’s co-founder and CEO.

Every day, millions of trees around the world are cut for construction. Trees contain about 50 percent cellulose, the molecules that give wood fibers strength. But here is a remarkable fact: agricultural and urban waste contain a much higher percentage of cellulose—up to 70 percent. Potter: “If you are looking for cellulose, wood would not even be your first choice. Cotton, hemp, soy, and wheat contain much more of this resource.”

Trees are strong because nature uses lignin, an organic polymer, to connect the cellulose fibers. It is the connection between lignin and cellulose that gives wood its mechanical strength and has made it a popular building material since the early days of human civilization. The groundbreaking innovation of ECOR is that the company has found a way to mimic that natural process.

Wood is a preferred building material. However, it is not always easy to use in industrial processes. Trees do not grow straight in standard sizes. That is why, after World War II when there was a great need for quick reconstruction, the building industry started looking for more efficient solutions. With the help of the advances in chemistry that had supported the war effort, engineers developed board panels. Wood particles were mixed with petrochemical glues. Plywood, particle board, and MDF have their roots in ‘military innovation’.

Panel boards with consistent quality and formats have revolutionized the building industry. The use of fossil fuels and the fact that the chemicals in the new materials leaked toxic gases were not considered problems in the 1950’s.

Around the same time, experiments were conducted in the Forest Products Laboratory of the US Department of Agriculture in Madison, Wisconsin that would ultimately lead to the launch of ECOR. The lab was developing technologies to generate new income opportunities for farmers. One such opportunity was finding productive uses for their waste streams. The lab created a process to turn the cellulose fibers in agricultural waste into panels that could be used for construction.  

The Forest Products Laboratory never turned the technology into a viable commercial application and the invention could have remained hidden in the lab if Jay Potter had not been looking for a career change.

Potter was educated as an engineer at the San Diego State University in the 1980’s. Early in his career, he was successful as a developer and investor in the oil and gas industry. In the 2000’s, as Al Gore began spreading his An Inconvenient Truth, Potter realized that his business efforts were making only a negative contribution to the emerging biggest issue of our times: global warming. He decided to shift his business towards environmental technologies.

He started a company that, in collaboration with Kyocera, pioneered the development of solar arrays for parking lots. The company went public in 2019 and reached a market capitalization of over $700 million before taking a recent hit. 

At a conference on sustainability, Potter met architect Robert Noble who had been awarded several environmental design prizes. Noble told Potter about a British company that was using waste from the wheat harvest to create boards for home building. When they found a similar technology in the Forest Products Laboratory, Potter and Noble decided to acquire the rights and start a business. 

There was one problem: like the conventional particle board and plywood industries, the panel technology of the lab used a toxic, non-recyclable glue to hold the waste fibers together. The solution was inspired by one of the earliest groundbreaking innovations of humans: more than 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians invented papyrus. They found a way to make the fibers of the papyrus plant interlock and create a sheet of paper that had strength without requiring any glue.

Potter challenged the engineers: “If a single sheet of paper can be strong without a binder or glue”, he argued, “why would it not be possible to press fibers into a thick panel without using any binding glues?” Like in paper, ECOR had to remake the connection between cellulose and lignin that naturally occurs in wood. Both ingredients are abundant in all plants and therefore in urban and agricultural waste streams. The company went through dozens of experiments with different fibers, and different levels of heat and pressure ultimately developing the exact ‘recipe’ for lignin and cellulose to reconnect.  

By the end of 2010, the company had successfully developed panels that—according to independent analysis—matched the performance of conventional wood-based boards. The success was acknowledged with a Cradle to Cradle bronze award and a membership of the C-100 innovation group of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an initiative committed to creating the circular economy.

ECOR built a first pilot factory in Kraljevo, Serbia. The panels produced in that factory were demonstrated in high-profile collaborations with Mars, Google, Amazon, Whole Foods, Hunter Douglas, General Mills, and others. These collaborations illustrated the vast potential for ECOR as well as the challenges to realize that potential. 

ECOR worked with Dutch beer multinational Heineken and developed a board using the brewer’s spent grain. Heineken was very enthusiastic about using the board for their packaging and promotional products worldwide as part of its sustainability and carbon emissions reduction policies. However, Heineken is sold in more than 170 countries. ECOR would need to build multiple factories across the planet to serve these needs of Heineken only. 

ECOR must also deal with the reality that different partners/customers will have different needs to close their circular loops. Heineken wants panels made from its spent brewer’s grain whereas Schiphol airport in Amsterdam wants to use the grass from the runways. As inputs differ, ECOR faces challenges to produce consistent output quality. Potter is not concerned: “The performance characteristics of our panels meet or exceed the standards of the materials they displace. That is the know-how we have built over the past 10 years.” Instead, he emphasizes the opportunity his company offers: “We can make commercially viable and scalable custom fiber alloys using the specific waste streams of our customers.”

As there is no end to the waste streams in the world, there is virtually no end to the potential market size for ECOR. Multinational Avery Dennison produces many of the labels found on the bottles and containers in the supermarkets around the world. All these labels are taken off rolls of a kind of oily ‘sticker’ paper. A silicon coating is added to the paper that allows for the labels to be easily taken off in automated processes.

The added mineral surface makes the paper subsequently unfit for recycling. The result is that every year Avery Dennison’s customers send more than one million tons (!) of this ‘sticker paper’ to landfills or trash ovens around the world. However, ECOR can use the Avery Dennison material as input for its panels. Potter: “Our solution can have a profound impact on the sustainability efforts of this multinational company.”

ECOR recently signed an agreement with French laminate flooring giant Tarkett to replace the particle board section—that cannot be recycled—in one of their parquet lines. If the collaboration is successful, the company has dozens of product lines that can be made sustainable and recyclable… 

Then there is the conscious consumer who is looking for sustainable building materials for their home projects at the local hardware store.

Industry statistics put the annual value of the market of wood panels at almost $150 billion—at least 20 percent of that market consists of substrates that ECOR can replace.

The opportunities do not end with panels. Niaga (‘again’ spelled backwards) was started as a green chemistry initiative by Dutch bioscience global enterprise DSM with the mission to “design out waste completely”. Niaga has worked with ECOR to make tabletops through turning the panels into a multi-layered board using an innovative non-toxic, fully recyclable glue. That innovation opens the door to healthy offices and classrooms where today much of the furniture is non-recyclable while it releases toxic gases from the chemicals that were used in the manufacturing.

Green chemistry is also enabling clean, recyclable coatings and fire-resistant qualities. Potter is convinced that such innovation will further expand ECOR’s potential market. “For decades, engineers have worked on the innovation of fossil fuel-based and poisonous plastics to serve the needs of society. Today, green chemistry is a rising new wave of research and development. There is a lot we can do with molecules in clean and healthy ways”, he says.

The opportunities start with readily available waste streams. Potter: “In the next decade, all major cities in the world are going to have a facility to convert available cellulose in waste streams into the building materials that communities need to support themselves.” He envisions that many of these facilities will be branded ECOR as the company is looking forward to rapidly scaling its environmental solution through licensing its technology around the world. 

An ECOR facility requires an investment that can be recouped within 3 to 5 years—not taking into account the potentially substantial gains from CO2 credits. After recently opening the plant in Venlo, ECOR is planning to build a new factory close to Schiphol airport in The Netherlands. More facilities in Europe are scheduled and a first factory in the US will be built next year.

The environmental gains are obvious. But there is more. Today, waste is collected in the Western world and often shipped to developing countries for recycling, burying or burning. Turning waste into raw material in the same location means strengthening local economies. “For manufacturers, it is about the decentralization of manufacturing and the de-risking of supply chains”, says Roberto Reyes, ECOR’s chief operating officer. 

After the Covid19 pandemic disrupted global supply chains, the war in Ukraine has further highlighted the dependency on raw materials from far away. For example:  China, Russia, Indonesia and Vietnam are the biggest exporters of plywood whereas the US, Japan and Germany are the biggest importers. The ECOR solution offers a clean, reliable, and faster, supply of raw materials for construction while generating local jobs.

ECOR shows that the circular economy is not a distant dream but an opportunity today. It is possible to make the same—and better—construction materials using waste rather than cutting trees in a circular economic process that cleans up pollution and makes a major contribution to reversing global warming and restoring biodiversity. “Trees build and sustain the Earth’s ecosystem. They should not be cut for products we only use a few days or even a single time”, says Potter.

Back in the factory in Venlo, Ron Seelen who recently joined ECOR as plant manager is witnessing how new hot panels keep rolling out of the ‘press-oven’ at the end of the production line. Seelen has had a long career at Trespa, a major European supplier of conventional panels. He has led factories where strict regulations must protect workers from dangerous chemicals. As a new panel slides off the conveyor belt, Seelen says with a contented smile: “This process is really easy and elegant: Just recycled fiber and water, heat and pressure… so simple.” [JK]