Sustainability Boards

Walking through the woodshop at Keene State College, it was hard to ignore the piles of high-quality wood headed for the scrap bin. The reality of larger-scale production is that it produces large amounts of “offcuts”. The challenge for this project wasn’t just to reduce the amount of waste leaving the woodshop, but it was to prove you can find value in materials that most would just throw away.

My goal for this project was to achieve as close to a zero-waste threshold as possible and to prove that the smaller irregular pieces were not of lesser quality; they just needed a different design approach. By reclaiming the off cuts i aimed to create boards that retained the same professional quality and durability as the main product line.

With a little bit of design freedom and creativity, I was able to reduce the amount of waste produced by Monadnock Edge Works to less than 1% of the total weight in raw lumber used. As well as providing more options to the product line, with one-off pieces that the customers could choose from, alongside the standard designs.