We have noticed this forum coming up when we google “Liberty Bricks”. I founded the company two years ago with the goal of producing pellets. When the credit tightened up and sawdust started getting scarce, we decided to scale back and work on collection and then discovered the brick product. We use the same machines that produce the Bio-bricks, Eco-bricks, US wood fuel brick and Envi-blocks. We learned a lot in the first full year of production and would like to explain the changes we made and get some feedback on what would provide the best value for our customers.
The biggest challenge in the business is to get enough raw material, because it is so bulky and messy. I identified a door factory as a great source of raw material a couple years before we started. They sand the doors down and have a relatively dense, free flowing dust that makes dense uniform bricks that are 10% heavier than bricks made from other dust. We even took a few hundred pounds of dust and made bricks before we bought our first machine. The dust is very fine and has to be handled very carefully. It is too fine to be used very much in wood pellets. The strange odor that some of the burning bricks have is from that dust and we could never identify exactly what caused it. It did not leave any unusual ash and did not seem to be from the scrap primer coated door skins that they chipped up, because we burned some bricks made with dust when the chipper was broken and got the same smell. As soon as we discovered the problem, we reluctantly stopped using that dust and it is going to landfill now.
We did check material safety data before we started and did not see anything unusual in the materials they used in the doors. There was some ordinary resin in particle board pieces, but most of those were inside the doors and did not constitute very much of the dust. It could have been something weird in the abrasives or in the glue that holds the abrasives on the sanding belts.
The only inventory left that includes the source that caused the strange odor is with PelletSales. Our biggest distributor, BT, sold out of those bricks in March.
With regard to packaging, we started with a polyolefin film that was recommended by our shrink wrap machine supplier. It is a very strong film and very clear so it is used for packaging all sorts of consumer products, including food. It is also very expensive. When oil prices spiked just as we were getting started, the packaging film alone cost over $10/pallet. We discovered that with chips and splinters in the bricks, just a little puncture would cause the wrap to tear. We switched to polyethylene film at the beginning of the year and solved the tearing problem completely, because polyethylene does not tear, it stretches. It is a little less strong though, so we more than doubled the thickness to 2.25 mils (thousandths of an inch). Fortunately it is so much cheaper per pound that we saved a little bit on a per package basis.
Of course the heavier packaging results in more used packaging. We have been asked if the packaging is recyclable. It is very pure polyethylene, so it could be recycled, but very few people collect it. We have large volumes of trimmings and no one around here will take it, so it goes to landfill. If you just stuff it in a recycling box and your collector doesn’t use it, you will not be forcing them to recycle it, you will be forcing them to sort through it and it will still go to landfill or will contaminate some other recyclables.
The same polyethylene film is actually used as bags to collect dust for incineration. It burns as cleanly as paraffin wax, which is what polyethylene is, a very high melting point synthetic wax. It has no ash forming additives and creates no smoke or chemical odor. If you notice any smell from the white smoke before it catches fire, the smoke smells like paraffin wax. Nonetheless, no stove manufacturer would ever recommend burning polyethylene in their stove and it is far too expensive to burn as a fuel anyway. However, if you start your stove with the waxy firestarter sticks, you are burning a small amount of refined petroleum that is chemically identical to polyethylene.
This leads to the issue of whether burning our bricks will void the stove warranty. Overfiring will ruin any stove and bricks are dry and can burn more quickly than cordwood. Once the fire is started, you must control the burn rate with air dampers just like you would if you were burning kiln-dried scrap wood. This is why some people avoid pine. You can easily overfire a stove if you stuff it with less dense wood that burns faster. Our bricks are dense and usually don’t need to be arranged any differently than dry seasoned cordwood. But because the bricks are smaller than most cordwood, you can overheat the stove if you overfill the stove and leave space for air to engulf a big pile of bricks. For the same reason, if you throw a whole bunch of wadded up polyethylene plastic into the stove all at once, you might damage the stove once the plastic melts and becomes a raging boiling liquid fire.
Some of our customers with large enough stoves feed an entire 10 brick bundle with the wrap still on. This keeps dust from shedding off the bricks and slows down the burn because there is no air between the bricks so it has to burn through 5 times the distance. The wrap just melts into the bricks and does not noticeably affect the burn because there is so little compared to the bricks. There is about 4 pounds of wrap on a 2000 pound pallet.
Please post back here with any further comments and concerns and I will respond as soon as possible.
The biggest challenge in the business is to get enough raw material, because it is so bulky and messy. I identified a door factory as a great source of raw material a couple years before we started. They sand the doors down and have a relatively dense, free flowing dust that makes dense uniform bricks that are 10% heavier than bricks made from other dust. We even took a few hundred pounds of dust and made bricks before we bought our first machine. The dust is very fine and has to be handled very carefully. It is too fine to be used very much in wood pellets. The strange odor that some of the burning bricks have is from that dust and we could never identify exactly what caused it. It did not leave any unusual ash and did not seem to be from the scrap primer coated door skins that they chipped up, because we burned some bricks made with dust when the chipper was broken and got the same smell. As soon as we discovered the problem, we reluctantly stopped using that dust and it is going to landfill now.
We did check material safety data before we started and did not see anything unusual in the materials they used in the doors. There was some ordinary resin in particle board pieces, but most of those were inside the doors and did not constitute very much of the dust. It could have been something weird in the abrasives or in the glue that holds the abrasives on the sanding belts.
The only inventory left that includes the source that caused the strange odor is with PelletSales. Our biggest distributor, BT, sold out of those bricks in March.
With regard to packaging, we started with a polyolefin film that was recommended by our shrink wrap machine supplier. It is a very strong film and very clear so it is used for packaging all sorts of consumer products, including food. It is also very expensive. When oil prices spiked just as we were getting started, the packaging film alone cost over $10/pallet. We discovered that with chips and splinters in the bricks, just a little puncture would cause the wrap to tear. We switched to polyethylene film at the beginning of the year and solved the tearing problem completely, because polyethylene does not tear, it stretches. It is a little less strong though, so we more than doubled the thickness to 2.25 mils (thousandths of an inch). Fortunately it is so much cheaper per pound that we saved a little bit on a per package basis.
Of course the heavier packaging results in more used packaging. We have been asked if the packaging is recyclable. It is very pure polyethylene, so it could be recycled, but very few people collect it. We have large volumes of trimmings and no one around here will take it, so it goes to landfill. If you just stuff it in a recycling box and your collector doesn’t use it, you will not be forcing them to recycle it, you will be forcing them to sort through it and it will still go to landfill or will contaminate some other recyclables.
The same polyethylene film is actually used as bags to collect dust for incineration. It burns as cleanly as paraffin wax, which is what polyethylene is, a very high melting point synthetic wax. It has no ash forming additives and creates no smoke or chemical odor. If you notice any smell from the white smoke before it catches fire, the smoke smells like paraffin wax. Nonetheless, no stove manufacturer would ever recommend burning polyethylene in their stove and it is far too expensive to burn as a fuel anyway. However, if you start your stove with the waxy firestarter sticks, you are burning a small amount of refined petroleum that is chemically identical to polyethylene.
This leads to the issue of whether burning our bricks will void the stove warranty. Overfiring will ruin any stove and bricks are dry and can burn more quickly than cordwood. Once the fire is started, you must control the burn rate with air dampers just like you would if you were burning kiln-dried scrap wood. This is why some people avoid pine. You can easily overfire a stove if you stuff it with less dense wood that burns faster. Our bricks are dense and usually don’t need to be arranged any differently than dry seasoned cordwood. But because the bricks are smaller than most cordwood, you can overheat the stove if you overfill the stove and leave space for air to engulf a big pile of bricks. For the same reason, if you throw a whole bunch of wadded up polyethylene plastic into the stove all at once, you might damage the stove once the plastic melts and becomes a raging boiling liquid fire.
Some of our customers with large enough stoves feed an entire 10 brick bundle with the wrap still on. This keeps dust from shedding off the bricks and slows down the burn because there is no air between the bricks so it has to burn through 5 times the distance. The wrap just melts into the bricks and does not noticeably affect the burn because there is so little compared to the bricks. There is about 4 pounds of wrap on a 2000 pound pallet.
Please post back here with any further comments and concerns and I will respond as soon as possible.
