One firm’s waste another’s fortune

Press, 13 June 1984, Page 30

One firm’s waste another’s fortune

By

NEILL BIRSS

If Christchurch has a golden opportunity it lies in sawdust. Thousands of tonnes are created every year: it is a waste problem.

The opportunity is there for anyone who can use this resource, at present largely a nuisance. Two Christchurch men are making a brave attempt to cash in on the sawdust pile. Mr Steve Grant and Mr Darryl Nicoison, of Advanced Energy Systems, Ltd, are compressing the waste into logs and pellets and selling it for fuel that burns without smoke in the wood space heaters that are now popular. The factory is hard to find. It is on a back section off Ferry Road and under another name, for the briquettes business initially was secondary to the pair’s making spa-pbol tubs. Mr Nicoison, one of the early MBA’s from the University of Otago, is a business and regional employment scheme consultant. He and Mr Grant set up their briquetting business in Foxton three years ago, but brought it to Christchurch last year. Mr Grant’s previous ventures have mainly been in tourism, but before becoming manager of Advanced Energy Systems and an associated firm, Affordable Leisure, Ltd, he and his father established an orchidgrowing venture at Queenstown. A third shareholder in Advanced Energy Systems is Mr Laurie Gorrie, who Mr Grant says was the initiator of briquetting in New Zealand. However, Mr Gorrie has little to do with the day-to-day operations of Advanced Energy Systems. They have a machine, worth about $70,000, made in Switzerland, which compresses the sawdust (or other waste) and forces it out in an endless tube along a cooling track. At the end of this, the tube is broken into portions of the desired length and bagged.

The chief material compressed is sawdust. The

firm trucks this from mills, which saves on the cost of disposing of it. The briquetting plant can process a truck load and a half of sawdust a week. The machine, in which a large reciprocating ram pounds waste through a tapered eye, can produce 180 kg of briquettes an hour. Briquetting on a smallbusiness scale with such machines is very common in Europe, but his firm has the only such machine in the country, Mr Grant says.

He has experimented with other raw material. He has produced briquettes of lucerne, which he says proved tasty to cattle and sheep, and of coal, straw, and bark. He has from overseas trips briquettes of cork dust and cotton waste. The firm sells its sawdust briquettes for $3.50 a bag. These are aimed at the wood-burning space heater market. For summer, it sells barbecue briquettes, slightly more compacted, giving more energy for a set volume. Mr Grant and Mr Nicoison have the New Zealand agency for the briquetter, and are trying to sell it to a number of firms with sawdust and other waste.

Overseas, Mr Grant says, many cabinet-makers, for example, have sawdust hoppers permanently linked to a briquetter. Briquettes are sold at the door, providing another income source for the firm.

The problem in New Zealand would be marketing the briquettes, and Advanced Energy Systems is offering to take ’ briquette output from those who buy the machines for retailing, either on outright sale or on a commission basis. Mr Grant thinks that there may be an export market for the machines. In some tropical countries, for example, briquetters make a fuel called bagasse from sugar-cane waste. He does not know of this being done in the South Pacific or Australia.