Summary
• Fercell recruited seven staff during the recession.
• Technology can reduce the volume of woodwaste significantly.
• A shredding and briquetting operation can cost just £100 per week.
• Industrial users of wood burners will be eligible for RHI payments soon.

Earlier this year the government unveiled the Renewable Heat Incentive, which will pay companies for burning their waste to create heat, along with a new Carbon Trust/ Siemens partnership to provide funding for biomass installations. Added to that are the increasing costs of waste removal and discussions next year on restrictions on woodwaste going to landfill.

Against this background, pollution control engineer Fercell Engineering Ltd in Aylesford, Kent, has been expanding to meet demand for woodwaste solutions, and not just from the company’s traditional woodworking industry customers.

Fercell’s boardroom looks like a sweet shop, with lines of glass jars filled with all manner of shredded waste material, ranging from various timber and panel products, to plastics, carpet, computer hard drives and even videotape.

Managing director Malcolm Fletcher showed me an empty supermarket carrier bag that the previous day had contained £10,000 cash from a customer desperate to get his hands on a Weima shredder, for which Fercell is UK agent, along with the German manufacturer’s briquetters.

Burgeoning industry

It is clear from the number and range of enquiries at Fercell that this is a burgeoning industry. Seven staff have been recruited during the recession, including two apprentices, to keep pace with demand.

The company, established 35 years ago, offers solutions for extraction, shredding, briquetting, wood-burning and compacting.

Fercell has a full demonstration facility at Aylesford to show how different waste can be broken down and, if required, turned into woodfuel briquettes.

“An 8-yard skip of joinery offcuts contains about 40% air,” said Mr Fletcher. “With the size of the material reduced you can at least halve the skip throughput.”

And with skip landfill tax currently at £88, that represents a sizeable saving.

A typical timber products manufacturer will be shredding pallets, solid offcuts and panel waste, with pallet nails separated from waste by “bullet magnets”.

Cutting costs

One customer, Devon engineered oak flooring specialist JF Joinery, used to leave its offcuts for villagers to use as firewood, while skipping growing amounts of dust and shavings.

JF purchased a Weima C170 briquetter and a 10-station bagging carousel unit to turn the dust and shavings into briquettes, creating a new saleable product and cutting out waste costs.

The success of the product with the local community encouraged the company to make a second purchase – a Weima WL4A 18.5kW shredder, so all the offcuts could be shredded and used as further raw material for briquette manufacture.

“Some people still use a skip or a 40ft container for their woodwaste,” said Bruce Le Gros, Fercell marketing and communications manager. “This technology is priceless if you are a joinery factory with a number of machines producing a large amount of dust and wood shavings and wood scrap per hour.”

Another Fercell customer is a whiskey barrel manufacturer who removes the metal rings from returned barrels and shreds the barrels to make briquettes.

High heat output

Wood briquettes have a high heat output (approximately 6kW/kg, compared to 4kW for kiln-dried timber offcuts), making it an effective fuel with little ash created. The Weima manufacturing process requires just pressure and the wood’s lignin as a binder, with briquette outputs ranging from 40kg/hr up to 700kg/hr.

Carousel multibag units mean the briquettes can be automatically bagged and the technology left to operate with minimum supervision.

A Scottish company is using an entry-level Weima briquetter, producing 100 10kg bags a week and selling all it can produce at £3.50 per bag, generating annual income of £18,200.

Fercell says a shredder and briquetting operation can be financed from about £100 per week, or just £45 for a small shredder. And it is so confident in the German machines’ longevity that it will buy back older machines if customers want to upgrade to a higher capacity model.

Shredder solutions range from the entry-level 1 series to Jumbo/Super-Jumbo shredders for high throughput, while briquetters range from the C series, to the TH and TH/S and TH/K for greater throughput.

Renewable Heat Incentive

With the prospect of companies able to earn money from the creation of heat using biomass boilers through the RHI scheme (7.6p per kW/hr for under 200kW installations), wood-burning technology is also firmly in the spotlight.

Some of Fercell’s customers burn wood waste to create heat in the winter and then manufacture briquettes in the summer.

Fercell supplies a range of biomass heaters, which it can re-engineer to provide exactly the heat output required. It also buys and refurbishes second-hand units.

The average cost of a wood burner project is about £50,000, with manually-fed boilers good for small heat requirements and low waste volumes, while briquetting is an option if more woodwaste is created than can be burned.

Sales director Mark Fletcher said the company’s engineering capabilities allowed it to turn its hand to anything – boiler refurbishment, vacuum table manufacture or even constructing spray booths for architects (for architectural model production), jewellers and engravers – so it could be a one-stop shop for customer requirements and providing turnkey solutions.

“If we were a company that sold just from product catalogues we would never have got that [spray booth] business,” he said.

Fercell’s 20,000ft² manufacturing facility includes CAD-controlled machinery for cutting and processing sheet metal, a shot-blasting room for cleaning refurbished machines and its own spray booths, while it employs three full-time engineers and has 17 others contracted around the country.

It recently became a distributor for German wireless technology provider Frieters to further aid dust extraction efficiency and reduce energy use.

The company normally holds two open days each year, the next taking place in autumn.