Recycled – Post Industrial

There are two categories of recycled wood products. Post-consumer recycling incorporates wood or paper fiber from products that have already entered the market and have outlived their useful life. It’s hard to find examples of this in the wood products industry, but in the paper industry it is common.

Post-industrial recycling, on the other hand, incorporates by-products from manufacturing processes. A common example of this practice in the wood products industry is to use sawdust resulting from the manufacture of solid products like lumber in making composite products like MDF or particleboard.

As an example of post-industrial recycled-content wood flooring, the wear layer (that is, the top, visible layer) of one of our flooring lines is made from veneer backer boards. The backer board is the part of the veneer log that is left over at the end of the veneer manufacturing process. Veneer backer boards are typically burned for boiler fuel, but this “waste” is actually the prime cut of top-quality logs and yields the most exquisite straight graining.  This is why we turn them into wear layers for architectural-quality flooring.