In 1946 George Flannagan started Elk Lumber Company on a corn field just north of Medford, Ore., the location of the present-day Boise Cascade plant.
He added a planing mill and wigwam burner to incinerate sawdust and wood waste, but within a year the mill had accumulated 15 acres of stacked waste wood.
“I decided to burn it up,” Flannagan said in an interview. “My mill superintendent and construction boss wouldn’t light it. So, I said I would light it myself. I got one guy to help me. We strapped 5-gallon tanks with pumps on our backs and started squirting saw oil on the wood. We started at 11 a.m. and by 4 p.m. everything was burned to the ground. The smoke went up about 5,000 feet in the air. People said it looked like an atom bomb.”
Today, utilization of a sawmill’s waste is the key to staying in business. Bark, sawdust, shavings and chips become raw material for valuable byproducts, ranging from horse bedding and paper to custom pallets and particleboard.
Wigwam burners have been outlawed in the Pacific Northwest for environmental reasons since the 1970s.
Source: Hegne, Barbara M. Logging the Rogue Valley. author, 1991, pp. 88-89; Long, Stephen. "Lumber, Chips, and Sawdust: For Sawmills, There’s No Such Thing as Waste." Northern Woodlands, Center for Northern Woodlands Association, 2019, northernwoodlands.org/articles/article/lumber_chips_and_sawdust_for_sawmills_theres_no_such_thing_as_waste. Accessed 20 Apr. 2019.
