On our Trusses 101 page you can see that using structural building components can save 25% of your total wood usage as well as reducing your on-site waste by 75%.
But how is this savings achieved at the truss plant? And what happens to all the waste created by production? Frankly, both answers depend on the truss company. ''Environmentally-friendly'' has been a hot topic at Tri-County Truss for several years, and we are proud to tell you that ZERO wood waste from our truss production goes to landfills. Here’s how:
In Truss Design
Our design staff strives to optimize every truss to use the least amount of lumber possible, then another dedicated team (called "cutters") considers the best lumber usage for each individual truss based on our current inventory. Can we move a splice to cut two sections out of one longer board and minimize waste? Our cutters review every single truss with this specific task in mind. They are also trained to work as QC on the initial design, building quality into your trusses up front
In Sawing
Tri-County Truss stocks lumber in 2' gradations in most of the lumber grades we carry. This means that we stock 2x4 in 8', 10', 12', 14', etc. If we need a 12'6" piece of lumber, we cut it out of a 14' board. That leaves only 18" of waste. If we only stocked 12' and 16' lengths, we would be discarding 3'6". So we’ve minimized the waste of this cut down to only 10%, but we don’t stop there.
Waste Recovery
Blocks, vented or solid, are commonly 22-7/16" and 14-7/16" in length. We have a special saw to recover these lengths from our discarded scraps.
Pieces shorter than 14-7/16" but longer than 9" or otherwise unsuitable for cutting into blocks are sold to a spliner, someone who fingerjoints short pieces back into 2x4s. While these fingerjointed studs can’t be used in our engineered wood trusses, they are used for wall construction (where they help earn points for various green building programs).
Our shortest pieces, from 9" to sawdust, all goes to a co-generator or "co-gen" plant only 2 miles from our facility, where it is burned to generate electricity that is sold back to Puget Sound Energy. Don’t think "wood stove smoke." Think "a large scale, professionally engineered, co-gen plant built to the strictest modern-day anti-pollution codes." This "cleanly" generated electricity is used to offset the need to build new dams, nuclear or coal power plants.
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Other Conservation Methods:
- We recycle all lumber wraps, those white coverings on lumber bunks, which become products such as Trex decking.
- What about those damaged or incorrect trusses that no one likes to admit to but everyone has? TCT sends them to a recovery specialist who uses large magnetic rollers to strip the metal plates and recover the steel. He then chips all the damaged lumber and makes pellets for wood stoves and other items.
- We occasionally end up with damaged plates and other metal, all of which is recovered by a local steel salvager.
- We service our own trucks and forklifts, so we know that 100% of the discarded oil, old parts, batteries, etc are recycled.
Energy Conservation by Design
Trusses allow for simplified construction with lower waste, but they have other advantages as well. Roof trusses can be designed with raised heel heights to allow for more insulation at the roof edge, often called "energy heels". Rather than pinching your insulation down to 4" at the wall, a simple 1' raise will allow you to place R-38 insulation or better right over the top of the wall.
Please see our Green Building page for more information about the environmental advantages of engineered roof and floor trusses.
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