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As 5 p.m. rolled around on Tuesday, trucks and cars poured into a lumber yard in Onalaska. Tree farmers and locals hurried to get a look at a new way to use wood scraps left over after milling.
The Lewis County chapter of the Washington Farm Forestry Association (WFFA) organized the Sept. 16 visit to Krume Custom Lumber in Onalaska to hear about a new business partnership.
The new venture is an agreement between Krume, which operates a lumber mill on the property, and Regenerative Industrial, who plans to use the leftover scrap wood to create carbon-based industrial and agricultural products including biochar, wood vinegar and wood tar.
Lewis County WFFA Chair Rick Kuykendall helped kick off the event, welcoming everyone in the audience made up mostly of farm forestry members, but also some Onalaska locals and even a district staff member for U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. The rest of the visit was guided by Regenerative Industrial cofounder Kevin Hoffberg, along with explanations from other members of the two businesses.
The visit was split into three main parts with Hoffberg introducing the new business, Mitch Krume sharing information about the lumber yard and mill, and Regenerative Industrial cofounder Clayton Turner speaking about the manufacturing of carbon products.
According to Hoffberg, Regenerative Industrial started when he and his son, and business partner, met a group of men interested in repurposing waste products from agriculture or timber. The group spent time looking everywhere between Seattle and Portland for a good place to start. After visiting Chehalis and the Economic Alliance of Lewis County, the business was connected with owner and operator of Krume Custom Lumber, Tom Krume.
Krume, which started its operations in April 2023, was looking for a business to rent part of its property that had been abandoned by a company that had planned to produce biochar on an industrial level, but didn't know what to do with the waste. The match was seemingly made in heaven as Regenerative Industrial was looking to start small and use everything that came from creating the biochar, even turning the byproducts such as tar and vinegar into useful products.
“The people who were here before, making a mess for those of you that know the story, did not know what to do with it, and so, for them, it was a waste product,” Hoffberg said. “Well, we have a background of distillation. For us, that product is gold.”
Later in the tour, Turner introduced the crowd of between 40 and 50 people to the equipment he and his team would use to turn the lumber scraps into something useful. The main piece to the puzzle is a pyrolysis machine. Pyrolysis is difficult to explain, but in simple terms, it means heating something without oxygen. In the case of wood, the heat turns it into something resembling charcoal, but with little to no ash.
The machine, a massive hunk of metal that looks like an oversized smoker, is stuffed with wood scraps and then goes through a 12-hour process of turning the wood into what Taylor and others in the industry call biochar. According to Taylor, the substance tests as more than 90% carbon and can be used for agriculture and also as a binding agent for many industrial products such as concrete, drywall and asphalt.
“We think that cement, asphalt, batteries, plastics, these kinds of products, are really the future of biomass in Washington,” Turner said. “That's basically the premise, is finished products ready to go from a system that I didn't have to do any weird zoning for.”
Taylor added that the 12-hour process uses no electricity and is kickstarted with 15 pounds of propane. After that, the process continues but is fueled by natural gasses released from the wood. In addition to producing carbon, the process also has two main byproducts, wood vinegar and wood tar, which the business plans to market for their own purposes.
Turner and Hoffman said the tar can be used to replace oil-based tar in a number of products, including ship coatings, and the wood vinegar can be used to help germinate seeds. According to the team, the products also happen to sequester carbon by putting it into products instead of burning it and releasing it into the air.
“When I say it sequesters carbon, it's not what we’re setting out to do. I just want you guys to understand that. It’s a side effect of our operation. Like, it's cool we’re doing it, but sustainability means making money and making these products.”
Mitch Krume also spoke during the tour, showing the audience the lumber yard and mill operated by him and his father, Tom Krume. Mitch spoke about the challenges he and his father have had in finding a place to send their wood scraps as industries that once took it, such as paper factories, dwindle. Mitch said he has seen byproducts such as sawdust pile up at other mill sites with nowhere to go.
“I went by and there was no less than 1,000 semi loads of saw dust,” Mitch said. “The biggest pile of sawdust I've ever seen. There was one on each side of the road. It's becoming a real problem. So, teaming up with them makes all the sense in the world.”
Krume Custom Lumber is not just a standard lumber mill. It is one of the few mills in the area that can process oversized logs that don't fit mills that process primarily farm timber. Oversized logs are more often than not old growth trees. Often, the result of milling oversized or damaged logs is a lot of waste and scraps.
Krume’s lumber yard is currently filled with charred oversized logs salvaged from a wildfire near Salem, Oregon.
