Winner: Sustainable Production Technology

As I have mentioned before, I am not going to use this blog to promote my new company. I have said very little about it to this point, but I intend to write one post explaining in detail what we do. I do think we have the best (the only?) commercial carbon sequestration technology, and I wanted to highlight that this week we won a national award in the Netherlands for Sustainable Production Technology:

Titan Wood Wins Prestigious National Awards for Sustainable Production Technology and Innovation

Titan Wood is the wholly owned subsidiary of Accsys Technologies that makes Accoya®. Here is the news release:

Titan Wood Limited (“Titan Wood”), has won the overall Dutch National Award for Sustainability Innovation – “The Columbus Egg” http://www.ei-van-columbus.nl/ – with its pioneering Accoya® wood product. Titan Wood also won in the category of Sustainable Production Technology. Titan Wood will now be entered into the European Business Awards for the Environment (EBAE) contest where winners will be announced during “Green Week 2008” the first week of June.

This year’s awards were opened by the Dutch Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, and are granted by the Dutch Government bi-annually to reward sustainability innovation in the Netherlands.

Wim Quik, one of the judges, commented: “Titan Wood’s Accoya® wood modification process is truly innovative. Thanks to this production technology, Accoya® wood has become a real alternative to increasingly scarce tropical timber. The ability to make high performance timber from fast–growing, sustainable species will help to protect threatened species and rainforests. Further advantages are that Accoya® wood can replace less environmentally friendly materials in demanding exterior applications and that it requires less frequent maintenance due to its improved durability and dimensional stability.”

Finlay Morrison, CEO of Titan Wood, added: “These awards recognize Accoya® wood’s innovative nature and its environmental credentials. It is a solid wood product made from certified sustainable sources and has multiple long-term environmental benefits as it is non-toxic, recyclable and acts as a carbon sink. We are enormously proud of the hard work that the Titan Wood team has put into the development of Accoya® wood and appreciate the growing recognition of its benefits.

18 thoughts on “Winner: Sustainable Production Technology”

  1. So … this process sequesters carbon in a long-lasting building material than can be used in place of tropical timber and other environmentally damaging materials (aluminium?). All good … but doesn’t the process itself use a lot of energy? A lot more than say, planting a tree and waiting a few years.

  2. I’m with you, Bob. My backyard offers a south Texas high heat and humidity testing environment. Seriously, congrats to you, Robert, and enjoy your new job. I’m glad to see Titan will license the process. Can Accoya eventually be cost-competitive with other treated woods?

    IPO in the near future??? 🙂

  3. All good … but doesn’t the process itself use a lot of energy? A lot more than say, planting a tree and waiting a few years.

    No. When you grow a tree, like a fast-growing softwood, what happens? It either grows to maturity, stands there for 100 years, falls, and releases its carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere. Or, it is cut down and used in an application that results in it releasing its carbon back to the atmosphere in less than 100 years.

    What happens with Accoya is that you can make a harvest every 20 years and put it into a long-term application. When you put it into an application that is typically aluminum or steel, you have a double-win: It takes less energy to make Accoya, and you have sequestered carbon where you would have placed steel.

    Of course you also have a big benefit, as you mentioned, by using it for applications typically reserved for tropical timber.

    RR

  4. Can Accoya eventually be cost-competitive with other treated woods?

    Depends on what you mean by cost-competitive. Is it as cheap as arsenic-treated wood? No, but arsenic-treated wood is toxic and has to be treated as hazardous waste. Likewise, there are similar issues with other cheap wood treatments like pentachlorophenol, creosote, borate, etc. Accoya is no more toxic than regular wood. There is no toxic residue from the treatment.

    IPO in the near future??? 🙂

    The parent company, Accsys Technologies, trades on the London Stock Exchange as AXS. Current market cap is €389.5 M, which is just over $600 million.

  5. How much net carbon is added to the wood? Let’s say a small piece of lumber contained ….oh, 600 grams of carbon, after everything else is burned off. If it was subjected to your process, would the total carbon content (repeating the same burn off) be 700 grams? 1000 grams? 2000 grams?

    How is it affected by seawater? If you make a floating boom out of a pine tree log, how long will it last??

  6. If someone builds a deck out of Accoya, and the house or the deck is torn down and replaced 80 years later, what happens to the Accoya and the carbon in it?

  7. How much net carbon is added to the wood?

    I don’t know that we have made that public, so I will defer on that question. If you are a numbers/science kind of person, look up some of the publicly available wood acetylation papers and presentations by Roger Rowell. He gives some numbers on acetyl content, which you can then use to figure out those answers.

    How is it affected by seawater? If you make a floating boom out of a pine tree log, how long will it last??

    The seawater question stumped me, because I couldn’t recall ever reading about tests with seawater. Accoya is very good about keeping water from penetrating it, so my suspicion was that any attack would be limited to the surface. However, I found this in one of our FAQs:

    Accoya™ wood is ideal for boat decks and trimmings and freshwater applications, such as canal sidings. Due to its lack of toxicity, however, Accoya™ wood is not suitable for underwater use in a salt water environment.

    I am not sure exactly what that last sentence means (“due to its lack of toxicity”) unless saltwater organisms are only slowed by toxic treatments.

    How long will it last? The Dutch have extensive experience using it for canal linings. That environment is water on one side and microbe rich soil on the other side. Some of that wood was pulled out after being under water for 10 years, and had no signs of decomposition.

    RR

  8. If someone builds a deck out of Accoya, and the house or the deck is torn down and replaced 80 years later, what happens to the Accoya and the carbon in it?

    We haven’t had to deal with anything like that yet, but we have discussed some possibilities. First, you can potentially reuse it in another application. Another option may be to recycle it back to the vendor, who could deacetylate it and recover all of the acetyls. We haven’t had to deal with this issue yet, but that’s an idea that’s been kicked around.

    Of course you can always dispose of it as you would natural hardwoods, since there is no toxicity: Burn it, landfill it, turn it into cellulosic ethanol or FT-diesel :-). You can’t do these things with most other treated woods.

    RR

  9. Congratulations on the award.

    Always good to see interesting new applications of technology.

    TJIT

  10. What they mean by “lack of toxicity” is a reference to marine borers. Sometimes, old wooden ships used to go into freshwater just kill the borers.

    Copper is the usual “toxic” for marine environmnents. There is copper bottom paint, etc., which you don’t need for a freshwater boat.
    It is quite expensive.

    Congratulations on the process!
    I’ll figure the carbon content out when I can! 😉

  11. C: If someone builds a deck out of Accoya, and the house or the deck is torn down and replaced 80 years later, what happens to the Accoya and the carbon in it?

    RR: First, you can potentially reuse it in another application. Another option may be to recycle it back to the vendor, who could deacetylate it and recover all of the acetyls.

    Of course you can always dispose of it as you would natural hardwoods, since there is no toxicity: Burn it, landfill it, turn it into cellulosic ethanol or FT-diesel :-). You can’t do these things with most other treated woods.

    Seems ironic. Other treated wood is less likely to be burned at the end of its structural life, so the toxic wood is actually more likely to sequester carbon for more than 100 years than is the Accoya, even if the toxic wood is otherwise worse for the environment.

  12. Seems ironic. Other treated wood is less likely to be burned at the end of its structural life, so the toxic wood is actually more likely to sequester carbon for more than 100 years than is the Accoya, even if the toxic wood is otherwise worse for the environment.

    No, as that misses two key points. Well, you touched on one in your last sentence. The reason toxic wood eventually fails is because it has leached its components out into the environment. So it continues to decompose at the landfill, albeit at a slower rate than normal wood.

    But the key point is this: The acetylation treatment not only makes the wood resistance to biological attack (as do toxic treatments), but it also imparts a great deal of strength to the wood, which is the real bonus.

    Toxic treated wood doesn’t become stronger. A toxic-treated pine is still a softwood. An acetylated pine becomes equivalent to a tropical hardwood. The durability and dimensional stability of Accoya exceeds that of teak. See here and here. Now you can go make bridges out of it, something you can’t do with the toxic treated woods. Thus, the acetylation opens up new applications, so there is much greater carbon sequestration potential.

    Cheers, RR

  13. Wood in Los Angeles is very often recycled. When a house is torn down, the wood is recycled. People tearing out decks list on Craigslist and the wood is used again.
    RR’s wood will just get used again, in any urban environment, for hundreds of years. It is great.

  14. No, as that misses two key points… An acetylated pine becomes equivalent to a tropical hardwood. The durability and dimensional stability of Accoya exceeds that of teak… Now you can go make bridges out of it, something you can’t do with the toxic treated woods. Thus, the acetylation opens up new applications, so there is much greater carbon sequestration potential.

    Okay, I see two points. One is, that by using pine, the teak forests can remain standing, sequestering its carbon (until the fuel load gets so high and lightning causes a forest fire). Though, if the teak forest ends up being burned down to make way for bio-ethanol or bio-diesel crops, then that would have been a futile gesture. The other point is that you say this wood can replace aluminum or steel. Metal doesn’t sequester carbon, so by putting Accoya there instead, you sequester carbon that couldn’t be sequestered there by other wood.

    Thanks for clarifying instead of ranting that I’m some denier.

    Interesting to read that much house wood in Los Angeles gets recycled. I have a builder friend in Rhode Island that says that wood from homes is often not recycled because it takes too much effort to carefully take apart the structure and then to sort the wood. The labor costs of recycling old wood out weigh the cost of new cheap lumber. I’ll have to ask him what happens to wood from torn down buildings where his is.

  15. OT – Electricity Generation

    There is a looming electricity crisis that is about to overtake the United States. While our demand for electricity continues to increase due to construction, computers (data centers take up a significant portion of electricity demand), and potentially even electric cars, essentially no new “base load” supply of electrical generation is being added to the market. We do get the occasional wind farm or solar or geothermal source of energy, and a bit of conservation is on the rise, but these tiny dents in supply and demand, respectively, don’t even begin to cover growth much less the fact that many electricity plants are aging and will face retirement in the future. Due to the long lead times involved with getting a new plant on line (at LEAST 5-10 years in the case of large base load coal or nuclear plants, best case), our problem is that we aren’t doing anything NOW to head off the crisis LATER, when we won’t have any options at all.

  16. Just one more reason Congress should mandate solar shingles on all new homes larry. We need all the watts we can get.

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