Squeezing profits out of wood waste.

Blending a talent for manufacturing with a flair for marketing helps the owners of West Oregon Wood Products turn piles of sawdust into a mountain of money.

Whereas most companies look at a pile of sawdust and see waste, the owners of Oregon Wood Products Inc. see a valuable raw material.

Founded by brothers Christopher and Francis Sharron in 1985, West Oregon Wood Products has turned other companies' sawdust and planer shavings into a multi-million dollar enterprise. The Columbia City, OR-based company specializes in converting wood waste into wood fuel pellets and logs, barbecue briquettes and mulch for commercial sale.

"The raw materials coming into our plant are critical to the quality of our finished products," said Christopher Sharron. "There are very clean materials available at sawmills coming off of planer heads or saw blades provided they are immediately and properly conveyed into a clean storage area to prevent contamination. In the past, much of this waste was considered trash and everything used to go into sawdust belts, including floor sweepings.

"Our suppliers know that we need our raw material to be as clean as possible without contaminants. For this we pay a good amount of money and regularly compete with particleboard plants and paper mills for raw materials," Sharron said.

HOT PRODUCT

The biggest seller for West Oregon Wood Products is Blazer wood fuel pellets, which are manufactured using a recipe perfected by the Sharrons. Through trial and error, the brothers developed a pellet recipe composed of approximately 70 percent Douglas fir and 30 percent western red cedar that holds together, burns hot and creates little air pollution or ash.

"At one time we used a 50-50 mix," Sharron said, "but the pellets sometimes formed a 'clinker,' fusing into a mass because either the homeowner did not know what temperature to burn the pellets at in his stove or because the stoves did not have temperature adjustment capability."

Sharron said the 70-30 mix of Douglas fir and western red cedar represents a good compromise between high heat generation and low ash content. He said clean Douglas fir has an inherent ash content of about 0.2 percent and 8,300 BTUs per pound. Clean western red cedar, meanwhile, has a 0.3 percent ash content and generates about 8,800 BTUs per pound.

"The end product provides consumers with more clean heat for their dollar," Sharron said.

PELLET-MAKING PROCESS

West Oregon Wood Products purchases about 8,000 tons of green saw-dust, shavings and chips each month from more than a half-dozen local sawmills. Most of the Douglas fir and western red cedar material is used in the manufacture of the Blazer wood fuel pellets. Alder waste is used in the manufacture of the company's award-winning Lil' Devils Barbecue, Smoking and Cooking Pellets.

While the company strives to buy the cleanest waste possible, it takes great pains to further refine raw materials at its 140,000-square-foot manufacturing plant and warehouse, where some 30 people are employed.

The pellet-making process begins by unloading the desired proportion of Douglas fir and western red cedar sawdust, planer shavings and chips from separate bins onto a screw conveyor that passes under a magnet to pull out metal. "We fill a 35-gallon drum about once every week with foreign metal," Sharron said.

The material then enters a dryer of the company's own design. It processes up to 12 tons of material each hour, lowering the moisture content from as high as 50 percent to 8 percent.

After drying, the material is conveyed over a screen. Materials bigger than 1/8-inch diameter are ground in a Jacobson hammermill before rejoining the smaller-sized material. Four pellet mills combine 250F of heat and 15,000 psi of pressure to instantly create pellets measuring 1/4-inch in diameter by 1-inch in length.

The pellets are taken by belt conveyor to another screening station that removes any "crumbles" before entering a vertical cooler that uses a fan to pull ambient air over the pellets. Once cooled, the pellets move into a holding bin with a 5-ton capacity. From the holding bin, the pellets pass over one final screen to remove any broken pellets before being packaged into 40-pound bags.

A separate production line makes fuel logs. The process, though similar to pellet making, is much more "forgiving," Sharron said. "The raw material does not have to be quite as clean. In fact, we can use lower-grade materials, including recycled products like pallets for fuel logs."

The 3-1/2-inch by 12-inch logs are compressed using one of three log machines. Logs are sold either as shrink-wrapped "six packs" or delivered to the retailer as a pallet load of 320 logs.

NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

While manufacturing is the back-bone of the company, creative marketing and continued efforts to develop new products are fueling the 12-year-old company's growth.

"The fuel product lines (sold at stores in Oregon, Washington, Utah, California and Nevada) run 24 hours per day, yet our sales season is only September through March," Sharron said. As a result, Sharron said West Oregon Wood Products has tried to "develop opposite sea-son products to maintain cash flow."

Among the newer products introduced by the company are:

* Lil' Devil Barbecue, Cooking and Smoking Pellets which feature seven varieties of hardwood and fruitwood sawdust formed into high-heat and residue-free 1/2-inch pellets. The product earned West Oregon Wood Products a 1996 Industry Award from the Pellet Fuels Institute. The cooking pellets are available in hickory, mesquite, alder, maple, oak, apple and cherry woods and are sold in camping and outdoor cooking sections in retail outlets in 41 U.S. states, Canada and Japan.

* Noah's Choice Premium Horse and Animal Bedding made from Douglas fir and pest-repelling red cedar shavings, was introduced in July 1996. The absorbent bedding product is sold in bales yielding 10 cubic feet of bedding at pet and feed stores in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada and Hawaii. Noah's Choice generated $100,000 of revenue in its first six months of sale.

* The company's newest product is landscaping mulch made from Douglas fir or western red cedar.

GREAT GROWTH

When the Sharrons purchased West Oregon Wood Products in 1985, it produced 600 bags of sawdust per month. Now the company manufactures the equivalent of 70,000 bags per month of its expanding product lines.

The addition of new products and new retailers has helped West Oregon Wood Products achieve average annual growth of 53 percent in each of the last five years. Sharron said he sees the company's workforce increasing by 20 percent this year and expects sales to continue growing by at least 25 percent per year for the next five years.

In addition to their core business, the Sharron brothers also operate Natural Resource Recovery, which specializes in consulting, designing and installing pelletizing equipment. Between 1989 and 1995, they designed 15 pellet mills. The brothers are also partners in a third company, World Energy Fuels, which makes the densified fuel logs.