Wood-waste burner
A wood waste burner
A wood-waste burner, or wood burner, known as a teepee burner or wigwam burner in the United States and a beehive burner in Canada, is a free-standing structure designed to burn waste wood from logging yards and sawdust from sawmills. Waste burners were originally cylindrical, and designs varied over time, but most surviving examples are of the conical type, and thus named for their resemblance to beehives, teepees, or wigwams. Burners have an opening at the top that is covered with a steel grill or mesh to keep sparks and glowing embers from escaping. Sawdust and wood scraps are delivered to an opening near the top of the cone by a conveyor belt or Archimedes' screw, where they fall onto the fire near the center of the structure.
Wood burners vent smoke and ash into the atmosphere without filtering, causing air pollution. Teepee burners went out of general use in the United States by the 1970s, and are prohibited from operation in Oregon and southwestern Washington state. A few derelict beehive burners survive in California, Oregon, Washington, and Western Canada. Most wood waste is now recycled for use in various forest products, such as pellet fuel, particle board, and mulch.
History
Origins
Industrial forestry in the Pacific Northwest began in 1827, when John McLoughlin built the first sawmill outside Fort Vancouver. By the end of the century, steam power and improved saw blades had rendered mills extremely productive.
“Wood-waste burner” enters the record as a wood waste burner. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wood-waste, burner and wood can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wood-waste burner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.