Waste wood

Rob Keeble

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12,633
Location
GTA Ontario Canada
Something i will never ever get used to in my neck of the woods is the pure waste i see.

Naturally this is a hangover of where i come from.

So Sat morning i am downtown Toronto and pull into this parking lot at rear of some stores.
I spot next to the dumpster some maple table legs.

Ask the person i was with if they minded if we picked up a few and put them in their trunk.

Here us what i got from those legs20170516_185952.jpg

8 nice 1.5 x2.5 x27 " worth of nice Maple hardwood.
Plus 8 inserts and also a brand new length of threaded rod not shown.

Calculated 5.6 bf of maple that had to be 8/4 before starting.

Their loss my gain. I guess because we burn hardwood nobody here sees the value.
But with 15% yield on tree for decent lumber one has to think about this.

Now my only regret is i left some behind.
I calculate at least $40 in my pocket. Not bad for couple of minutes pickup and clean up.

Oh also scored the inserts. They were in the top of the legs. Cut that bit off.
 
Hey, that's nice looking stuff and the price was right. The thing that bothers me is seeing nice old hardwood logs taken down by arborists or the power company and just junked up for firewood. I've intervened there a few times, but you have to be quick and have the right gear (or a friend with a boom truck who can use a bit of cash).
I know a guy outside of Vancouver (not much native hardwood there) who's a determined recycler of old furniture. He had an impressive stock of mahogany the last time I was there, from fine old tables and casework that was just going to the dump.
 
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The industrial unit next to mine were a Double glazing Company & I took some really nice bits of mahogany out of their skip, spoke to one of their fitters once who told me the stuff they were ripping out & putting in the skip was better quality than the new stuff they were fitting. Unfortunately they aren't there anymore so no more free wood :(
 
Nice haul, I don't think I couldn't left those alongside the road either..

Having said that I hear you on the other bits and I can't decide if I'm happy or sad that I walked away from a truck load of LARGE white oak blocks I could have had for turning blanks for free the other weekend. After some looking I decided I wouldn't get it turned before it cracked anyway. I did split some quarters out of one of the longer pieces though ;)

Agree, a lot of nice wood is wasted. Walnut is often used as firewood around where I live. :(

The really sad part about that is it's not even that great of firewood!
 
Something i will never ever get used to in my neck of the woods is the pure waste i see.

Naturally this is a hangover of where i come from..... .

Nice haul Rob! I love dumpster diving. Are you saying that back home in SA there is similar waste, or that back home nothing goes to waste?
 
Well Ted its Africa ,they even recycle old plastic bags. Waste i see in Canada is simply amazing. Breaks my heart that resources are so wasted here.
Wood such as maple, oak , poplar ,walnut etc common hardwoods in NA are not indigenous to SA. The pine that grows there is not indigenous but is grown for pulp and paper and chipboard.
When it is turned in into lumber it can have 10mm between annual rings so if you think home depot spf warps you aint seen nothing yet.
Then there is blue gum, eucalyptus brought to the country for mining stopes and props.
That leaves local indigenous hardwood which is not cultivated in forests and so wild ,random, and expensive.

The better exotics come from African jungles closer to equator and more water.

But when i look at waste i look at all sorts, like even food waste.
 
You know sometimes I drive around town too and I'll see some old furniture or wooden pallets that people have just thrown out and for the right price, you can buy those items for really cheap and bring them home to repurpose them into something. Honestly with a bit of imagination, anything can be turned into something!
 
There is soo much talk about recycling here in the US, but I agree we are a country of waste.

When I was a kid we used to straighten nails and reuse bricks. Buildings would get "disassembled" and repurposed. Some of the old mills were build with Chestnut beams.

Today, I do not see any used bricks of used wood available anywhere.

There is a video study of the mega slums in Mumbai India. The efficiency and use of materials within the slums is impressive - NOTHING - goes to waste there, not even the plastic bags.

Years ago we DID recycle.
Nowdayz - we TALK about recycling, and how the dollar payout is not profitable enough.
Also, we want everything new and old stuff goes into the dumpster, this is the norm.

What we need is a national or multinational PARADIGM shift ---- GOOD luck with that.
In the meantime - tears in the eyes in the norm.

To me - I see a picture of a HUGE mansion, with an ultra rich family, with many servants, and the ultra rich mom is running around, obsessed with her big ball of aluminum foil and ranting about how we need to recycle, and also oblivious to the reality of life.
 
There is soo much talk about recycling here in the US, but I agree we are a country of waste.

When I was a kid we used to straighten nails and reuse bricks. Buildings would get "disassembled" and repurposed. Some of the old mills were build with Chestnut beams.

Today, I do not see any used bricks of used wood available anywhere.

There is a video study of the mega slums in Mumbai India. The efficiency and use of materials within the slums is impressive - NOTHING - goes to waste there, not even the plastic bags.

Years ago we DID recycle.
Nowdayz - we TALK about recycling, and how the dollar payout is not profitable enough.
Also, we want everything new and old stuff goes into the dumpster, this is the norm.

What we need is a national or multinational PARADIGM shift ---- GOOD luck with that.
In the meantime - tears in the eyes in the norm.

To me - I see a picture of a HUGE mansion, with an ultra rich family, with many servants, and the ultra rich mom is running around, obsessed with her big ball of aluminum foil and ranting about how we need to recycle, and also oblivious to the reality of life.

I've seen this many times as well Leo and it's discouraging for sure.

I was heartened, however by a demolition that took place not far from here last winter. A local hotel and small convention centre had a business ending fire about five years ago that took the middle part of the building and leaving a couple of brick and steel wings mostly untouched, but really useless as a structure. It stood there for sale for about five years, in spite of a great location, until one of the major construction companies in the area bought it.
They undertook the most meticulous demolition I've ever seen in this country. More of a deconstruction really. Everything was sorted, right down to individual bricks, concrete blocks and steel beams.
Standing timber on the site was harvested, with firewood processing underway for the hardwood and a guy is there with a Woodmizer milling out some nice white pine and some oak logs.
It's very nice to see how they've gone about it.
 
Probably depends a lot on your locality and since ours provides a recycle bin, the recycle bin is more full than the trash most weeks, not something we used to do a lot of before the bin came along.

I was looking at places to take yard waste yesterday. The city's yard waste center actually has agreements setup with a lot of the school districts to collect kitchen vegetable waste from the cafeterias for turning into compost here.

The institute where I work has actually done away with trash cans at everyone's desks (you can have one, but you have to empty it yourself), and setup central trash and recycling locations on each floor for members to drop off their trash at. They also do a good job of donating old materials, computers, office furniture, etc. to places that accept it.
 
Talk about office protocol.

As many know I am an engineer.

Years ago we made "drawings" with pencil, or ink on Vellum(a kinda of rice paper).

When copies were needed we made blueprints. It was a pain in the back, so blueprints were a little bit limited and not readily thrown out.

Today - as I joke about it - in a paperless society (yeah right) - we take a digital image (drawing) and send it to the printer. It's just sooooooo easy to print it out. We could do that just to check it out, then toss it, make a small correction and reprint it. If I need copies for a meeting I may print 20 or more copies - most of which don't even get looked at, then tossed.

Oh sure - we recycle paper, but we use tons more than we used to use. That printer is very very busy all day long...... BUT,........ we recycle :rofl:.

Junk mail - ohhh don't even go THERE.

It's a cryin shame I tell ya - a cryin shame!
 
Probably depends a lot on your locality and since ours provides a recycle bin, the recycle bin is more full than the trash most weeks, not something we used to do a lot of before the bin came along...

One thing I miss about living in LA is the green yard waste bin, next to the blue recycle bin and the black trash bin. Some neighborhoods in LA even have brown bins for livestock waste, primarily horse manure. The green yard waste was recycled into compost. Here in Albuquerque we only have the blue and black bins. I wish we had dedicated yard waste pickup (and recycling).
 
My pet peeve is pallets, I see cherry ones daily now and 2 times this year, black walnut. I can not believe it. Still better than chipping it I guess.
 
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