Repurposing sawdust to make sustainable homewares

Irish Times

a day ago

In 1977, Noel Fay senior began making custom-built kitchens in his workshop in Co Kildare. Almost half a century later, the company is thriving.
Having studied furniture design and manufacture at ATU Connemara, Conor, his grandson, joined what is now called The Carpentry Store as operations manager on the wood manufacturing side of the business in 2022.
One thing that had always bothered Conor Fay was the amount of sawdust that ends up as waste, not just in his family's business but wherever wood is cut commercially.
The Fays use waste sawdust to fuel their factory's heating system during the winter, but Fay believed there had to be a way to turn it into something more valuable. This was the inspiration behind what has since become Forest Living, a manufacturing start-up that repurposes sawdust to create homeware products, including coasters, placemats, and tea light holders.
'There is currently no high economic value use for sawdust despite it being a major natural resource,' Fay says.
'The main use of sawdust is as biomass in power plants and as animal bedding. While this is a renewable material that saves the burning of fossil fuels, it still releases CO2 into the atmosphere when burned, which would be better sequestered in products.'
Asked how he made the jump from a pile of sawdust to a usable solid material, Fay says he started by trawling the internet for anything remotely related. He found references to sawdust being turned into packaging, and when he dug deeper to see how this was achieved, he discovered that the 'secret sauce' was the part of a fungus known as the mycelium.
'Mycelium is the root structure of mushrooms, and when added to the sawdust, it binds it together to create a solid product,' Fay says.
'I spent a huge amount of time on research, sieving through countless articles about sawdust and looking at the findings from universities doing experiments with mycelium.
'I subsequently stumbled across a company using mycelium as a binding agent to hold rice husks together to create sustainable packaging, and after investigating this further, I found that Reishi mushrooms are a suitable fungi for growing on hardwood sawdust.'
Keen to see for himself how the interaction between the sawdust and the mycelium worked, Fay sourced spawn culture in Belgium and began experimenting in his spare time.
The process starts with moistening the sawdust, which is then sterilised and the culture is added. The mixture is left to mature while the mycelium works its magic. When it's ready, the mix is dried to kill off the culture. What remains looks like clumpy or granular soil that can be coloured with natural dyes and pressed into a mould.
'The use of a natural binding agent allows the product to be fully biodegradable and lends itself perfectly to the circular economy by not contaminating any resources with complex materials that can't be separated at the end of their lives,' Fay says.
'I grew up around timber and wood machinery and have an in-depth knowledge of the industry. Disposing of waste sawdust is an industry-wide issue because very often it just ends up in a skip and costs the producer money. I felt this was such a waste of a natural resource,' says Fay, who adds that those with surplus sawdust will be more than happy to have someone willing to take it off their hands.
Forest Living will have its official launch at the Ploughing Championships in September, at which time its ecommerce site will also go live and the company will start exhibiting at trade fairs.
Apart from a substantial amount of founder time, Fay estimates that he has put roughly €30,000 into the start-up between his own funds and support from the New Frontiers programme. The company has also received an innovation voucher from Enterprise Ireland, which is being used in conjunction with Trinity College Dublin to establish the feasibility of turning the sawdust into solid panels that could be used in large applications such as furniture making.
In 2020, Fay went back to College to do a master's in business management at Maynooth University. 'I had technical qualifications and my practical experience, but I felt that in order to be fully rounded, I should also build my skills on the business side.
'I think doing the Master's made me very familiar with how to do good research and that stood to me when it came to exploring the idea for Forest Living,' Fay says.
'The hardest part of getting my idea off the ground has probably been accepting failure and learning to know when something isn't going to work and then finding a solution or an alternative,' he adds.
'Learning how to just keep going and adapt and change along the way based on market research and technical limitations has been one of the hardest things to get used to, but also one of the most rewarding.
'The New Frontiers programme and the Kildare Leo (local enterprise office) have been invaluable, as I feel it would be too much to take on something like this and try to navigate it solo.
'The application process for the innovation voucher was seamless, and the support from Trinity College has been a massive advantage. I linked in with my local enterprise office very early on, so I feel I've been well supported throughout my entire journey so far.'