r/Anticonsumption • u/Dollbeau • Apr 01 '26
Reduce/Reuse/Recycle 3 tons of flooring offcuts headed to landfill
Surely in this modern world of Robots, 'aware' computers & self-driving cars, we can think of better use for 3 tons of wood offcuts, than burying it?
This is from a flooring company, who do this every couple of weeks (or more); which equates to a minimum of 78 tons a year, from a single small business, with only a handful of staff.
Imagine the scale of waste worldwide!
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u/Flowerpower8791 Apr 01 '26
Send their marketing department... or owner if they're really small... with a passionate plea to do something with these pieces. Donate to Habitat for Humanity store or other type of charity. Good grief... what a waste!!! I could do hundreds of projects with these pieces!
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u/SnooKiwis6943 Apr 01 '26
Herringbone pattern on floor.
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u/human-aftera11 Apr 01 '26
People are creative and would come up with all sorts of ideas to repurpose the material.
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u/Pittsbirds Apr 01 '26
Craft groups and stores would also have a field day with this. There's a store in Pittsburgh that's basically nothing but bits and bobs and odd ends. Old newspapers, loose buttons, torn up clothes, stuff like that
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u/Helenium_autumnale Apr 01 '26
We have two! One for arts and crafty things and one for construction stuff. These kind of re-stores can salvage all of that stuff and actually SELL it to people who would make beautiful things from it. We should give donors a tax deduction to do this.
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u/callmemaude Apr 01 '26
Omg yes the creative reuse center at construction junction! My in laws live in Pittsburgh and I save weird odds and ends specifically to send back with them to donate.
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u/Lockjawtheturtle Apr 01 '26
I wonder if they could get a tax credit for donating to habitat for humanity? Money makes the world go round
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u/hike2climb Apr 01 '26
They should really have a free pile in the parking lot. The flooring store near me sells carpet cutoffs, really decent sized pieces for $5.
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u/tanhan27 Apr 01 '26
That's awesome, I always dreamed of making some cool patchwork quilt style carpeting in the house using squares of different scraps
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u/Helenium_autumnale Apr 01 '26
We bought a few of those, for a shoe storage mat near the door. They look great!
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u/CautionarySnail Apr 01 '26
Perhaps if we knew the name of the company or the location, locals could reach out about the schedule of trashing those offcuts.
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u/Dollbeau Apr 01 '26
It's in Australia
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u/persnicketychickadee Apr 01 '26
wait - what?! In Brisbane and Sydney there are industrial discard shops (not for about other cities). Reverse Garbage takes the discards and sells them - it’s not for profit the monies go towards supporting more reuse and offering programs. I know in Brisbane the warehouse was a bit full - but when these sorts of things come through they do move (looking meaningfully at the boxes of tiles i acquired in January)
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u/Dollbeau Apr 01 '26
I'll tell them about ReverseG when I see them next, I didn't know they took offcuts like this
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u/gentle_viking Apr 02 '26
I used to work at Reverse Garbage many years ago- these kind of timber offcuts would sell like hotcakes. If you email them at RG they can always contact the flooring company directly and organise a regular pick up of the materials!
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u/KookyEnthusiasm4755 Apr 01 '26
Surely people would jump at this if it was put up for free on Marketplace.
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u/bellybuttonbidet Apr 01 '26
Is that solid wood? There are USDA grants to turn them into pellets and use it to heat your facilities. That might be too woke for most woodshops.
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u/gormholler Apr 01 '26
Is that what "woke" really is? Responsible? Stewardship? Logic? Anti-wasteful? I've been wondering for quite a while now...
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u/bismuth17 Apr 01 '26
Civic minded, in general. Yes.
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u/moldy-scrotum-soup Apr 01 '26
Caring about anything other than pissing off liberals or about anyone else but your klansmen is weak and woke if you're in the MAGA cult.
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u/tanhan27 Apr 01 '26
Yeah these days "woke" when used as a pejorative just means doing anything that is non-selfish/for the good of others
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u/PM_ME__BIRD_PICS Apr 01 '26
Then normal empathetic people need to stop fucking using the word, it perpetuates it just as much.
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u/Spendoza Apr 01 '26
Yup. Also "aware of and not accepting systemic injustices against marginalized peoples"
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u/ArtInTech Apr 01 '26
Nah man, fox news says woke is bad or something
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u/moldy-scrotum-soup Apr 01 '26
According to fox, it's turning the frogs gay and teaching children to use litter-boxes.
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u/e37d93eeb23335dc Apr 01 '26
From what I can tell, woke means educated. But as Trump said, smart people don’t like him, so he and his hate the educated.
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u/ThaddeusJP Apr 01 '26
Looks like MDF decking
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u/Dollbeau Apr 01 '26
I think it is merbau hardwood. It does have screw holes drilled at some points, but matching lengths...
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u/wb247 Apr 01 '26
They could definitely be sold online as knife scales if ripped and cut to 6 or so inch segments. 10-15 a set. Or pen blanks if cut even down smaller.
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u/_stib_ Apr 01 '26
Wait, people make decks out of MDF? Do they replace them every time it rains or something?
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u/cwmosca Apr 01 '26
I use all my scrap wood to build shelves in my basement. I’d be thrilled to find this uniform gold mine.
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u/bugabooandtwo Apr 01 '26
Can't these be used for firewood, or smaller woodworking crafts? Seems odd the company would throw them away. They could make money off that wood.
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u/AccidentOk5240 Apr 01 '26
They’re probably composite/laminate aka termite spit and can’t be burned :(
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u/NiniBellini Apr 01 '26
There’s a timber flooring company that offers customers cut price deals on flooring using their offcuts from previous projects. Pretty cool idea.
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u/FirefighterPrior9050 Apr 01 '26
They've been doing that with carpeting since 1960 it's called remnants
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u/Arch____Stanton Apr 01 '26
This looks an awful lot like vinyl laminated casing.
The grains are identical on every piece as far as I can tell.
All the colours are also the same.
The end grains are not anything I can recognize as wood.
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u/Dollbeau Apr 01 '26
Happy to be corrected, all I saw was wood waste.
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u/Arch____Stanton Apr 01 '26
I am not at all sure, so maybe "corrected" but then again maybe not.
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u/pixeltweaker Apr 01 '26
Back in the 80s we would have converted that into a tree house in an afternoon.
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u/Regular-Sandwich-550 Apr 01 '26
i'm currently walking on subfloor because i can't afford to get flooring. this would help me immensely
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u/AcceptableHorror705 Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26
Name and shame so we all know to avoid giving them business
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u/a-Centauri Apr 01 '26
Would it be serious to want to buy that at a discount or dumpster dive it? It's like tongue and groove or planks of odd lengths from what I can see
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u/Styl3Music Apr 01 '26
This could easily be modified for shims. Could also be used for particle board, pellets, or mulch/fertilizer with a little free pile. If the company you work for isn't using this buried wood to make soil, then either bring up reusing it or jump shit because the higher ups are literally wasting tons that could be recycled and/or sold. You may have to actually put thought into presenting the ideas, but come on. Either you're ignorant or the use at your work or the owner doesn't know tons are being buried when they could profited from.
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u/Dollbeau Apr 01 '26
I don't work for them, just observed them in action.
Someone else has provided an easy (& free) answer I will throw at them - I'm sure the company would appreciate saving money on skips for a start.
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u/gakl887 Apr 01 '26
When I worked construction, that was where I saw the largest waste. People talk about small consumer things, but I’ve been involved in projects like when we renovated a kitchen 3x in 4 years because the wife of customer wasn’t happy.
Literally ripped out brand new cabinets, flooring, etc that were barely used because they didn’t live there often. It’s gross. We did try to reuse it tho
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u/HillBillyHilly Apr 01 '26
Can I tell you that I had a customer who started a business taking cast off from high end renos? He was w the demolition crew and saw all the perfectly good stone, piping, metals, cabinets etc going to landfill. He asked boss if he could have instead and boss said sure! He would take to a warehouse, sort of out, price and sell. Loved the guy.
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u/Dirtbagdownhill Apr 01 '26
I have a couple hundred linear feet of white oak trim because of this kind of thing. Thousands of dollars of clear trim that was destined for the dump. Is that stuff engineered or hardwood?
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u/tequilablackout Apr 01 '26
I'm keeping all the offcuts from my latest improvement project. I'll be able to build out shelves and other stuff with them.
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u/NoBodySpecial51 Apr 01 '26
I could use that to fix a couple things around here. Things like this are so frustrating. I’m sure there is someone nearby that could use this material to build or fix something.
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u/iliketreesndcats Apr 01 '26
Offer a flooring system using the offcuts
There will be people who buy it. It's enviro entally friendly and it's going to look different and maybe a bit wacky but hell yeah id have that, especially if it's at a reduced rate. You'll get people who wouldn't have bought your other flooring who might buy this one if it's environmentally good and cheaper
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u/Mofupi Apr 01 '26
Something like ten years ago I found a simple program on the internet, where you entered the dimensions of your wooden board and the dimensions of the rectangles you wanted to cut from it. And then the program calculated a way to orient your rectangles to minimise waste. I remember the design was pretty ugly, but it worked great and if you got the paid version you could also do more complicated stuff, like consider grain orientation. If something like that was possible on my crappy laptop, for free, back then, I would bet there are professional programs now that deal exactly with the use case of reducing flooring waste while getting aesthetically pleasing results.
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u/colako Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26
It's a fail on their own business model because they could create a second product with that and find a customer that would regularly buy them.
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u/careerconfused44 Apr 01 '26
I work for a small business that also throws away a LOT of wood every day and while I hate it too, its just not realistic to expect a company to have the time and resources to find uses for all their offcuts. I (and many of my coworkers) save as much as we can, we have many many scrap racks/scrap piles and anything small gets turned into shims. And yet we still fill up dumpsters and dumpsters of wood. I post on buy nothing and my personal socials all the time trying to give stuff away, there is just not enough demand to meet the amount of garbage we produce. This is true for grocery stores, clothing stores, bookstores, EVERY area of industry. In fact seeing it at my own job is one of the things thay radicalized me towards anticonsumption. If you think a company should be boycotted for this, im sorry but you just dont understand that this is how the entire world operates. And this is an extremely small percentage of the amount of garbage created worldwide by much larger companies. I personally designed and built a bookshelf using small scrap pieces, im really proud of it but its one bookshelf. Another coworker of mine makes furniture to sell out of scrap pieces, it takes a lot of creativity and I love his designs. But you have to understand that "someone could use this" will only turn into actual real life usage if people like me and you commit to finding ways to use it. Let's not shame them unless you personally are committed to reducing waste in your own communities and workplaces too
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u/Dollbeau Apr 01 '26
I have not named the business. They could bring it from the jobsite to the skip location, so why can't they put it in their yard (which is huge & normally empty) for people to help themselves from.
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u/TopRamenisha Apr 01 '26
I mean I literally just googled “recycle wood and building materials near me” and found several places to recycle wood scraps or donate building materials for reuse. Some of these places are nonprofits, so if you donate building materials that can be used by others, you can write the donation off on your taxes. I think a lot of us know how the world operates and are committed to reducing waste in our own communities and workplaces. Sometimes shame is the way to get companies to change their wasteful behaviors
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u/someoneyoudontknow0 Apr 01 '26
Literally need something like this to replace the wood on my outdoor ikea cafe chairs
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u/sohcordohc Apr 01 '26
Places like Re-Home (formerly habitat for humanity) take weird leftovers depending on what they are. That’s crazy even if not for a floor it could’ve been used for something
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u/ThrustTrust Apr 01 '26
Can we not reach out to these people. Can’t we cure the Company name or phone number on here?
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u/Dollbeau Apr 01 '26
If you are in Sydney & want their details I will DM you so you can approach them, but it's an endemic issue & not just one companies fault, so I don't think shaming them works
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u/ThrustTrust Apr 01 '26
I didnt mean shaming them. I meant being able to help them. But I get ya.
Also no I’m not near there. I assumed this kind of waste was a USA thing.
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u/Tetragonos Apr 01 '26
graduated college, finally get a job, spent 2 weeks throwing away paper files... I had carefully recycled and sorted trash, composted.. the whole captain planet system to save the planet... I threw away at least 4 times as much as I had ever recycled in my entire life.
Really put things into perspective and how small I was.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Phase70 Apr 01 '26
Jesus... I literally need this right now.
I would fill my car, and come back tomorrow to fill it again. Maybe a few more times.
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u/Glanzenwicht Apr 01 '26
A buddy of mine is a carpenter that installs counter tops and the like in houses. He's taken me to job sites before and pointed out that excess building material and cutoffs get thrown away.
It's part of the reason that building a new house is so expensive. Builders order one and a half houses worth of material, and throw away everything they don't use because of the labor and storage costs. It's easier and more profitable for them to just charge the customers for the excess, then throw it away.
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u/MoebiusBender Apr 01 '26
Wood is expensive, I just paid 12€ for a single 20x60x1000mm³ piece of beech.
And these offcuts are beautiful, I'm sure they could make a few hundred bucks a week selling them off or at least save time and transportation costs by giving them away to whomever picks them up.
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u/FishDispenser2 Apr 01 '26
It could be used for fishbone pattern wooden floor or craft details! I was into making dollhouses from scrap and this would have been SO useful!
Also, you could use it for stirring paint.
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u/Delicious-Cable-7435 Apr 01 '26
My house built in the 40s used offcuts from the richer neighborhoods being built for its flooring.
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u/qinghairpins Apr 01 '26
….Can it not just be chopped smaller and used for firewood? Or something? Like isn’t chipboard just glued together bits of crappy wood?
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u/Fluid-Pack9330 Apr 01 '26
Free lumber! Come back with a trailer and take it. I would take at least some if i were there.
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u/J1mj0hns0n Apr 01 '26
Yeah it's a shame how many missed opportunities end up in waste, like it could've been burned for heat, assembled into crates cupboards and tables, whatever you could've jerryrigged it to do. But all that is going to happen is it sit in the waste pile bubbling up methane for the next 200 years. Woo.
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u/Any-Description8773 Apr 01 '26
Being one that is in the trades, it sucks I completely agree……
However, if you were to keep the cuts and attempt to use them elsewhere you stand several issues. The biggest one being the flooring won’t match if it’s pre-finished/stained. Then you have your customer upset.
The next issue is if you attempt to store it for THAT ONE PERSON who would be cool with a whimsical design made completely from scraps, you would have several warehouses full.
My take is offer the homeowner/building owner the scraps as spares for repairs or other projects. Any type of construction ends with a lot of leftovers that you rarely will use.
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u/fooperina Apr 01 '26
Too bad there’s not a Habitat for Humanity store these can be donated to. Great resource for salvage and low cost building supplies
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u/AnonymousGuy2075 Apr 01 '26
Should be illegal to get rid of that much "waste" (good, usable material) if there's someone who can take it.
They should have to make it available to a non-profit or something. For 3-7 days. And then after that time, if no one gets it, they can trash it.
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u/Glass-Lead-5946 Apr 01 '26
Construction waste amounts to 60% of the total waste produced in the UK, makes my blood boil
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u/EchoGecko795 Apr 02 '26
Not sure how long those are, but they look at least 18 inches, which I could make some nice boxes out of.
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u/c_r_a_s_i_a_n Apr 01 '26
Same company probably virtue-signals on their website:
“we believe in being good stewards of our forests. We donate 5% of our proceeds to reforestation in the amazon”
spokesperson drives away in a F350 pavement princess
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u/StarGek_Interceptor Apr 01 '26
Why not take it to a Habitat for humanity thrift store. You'll be contributing to a good cause, and you'll have something to write off your taxes
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u/redpandafire Apr 01 '26
Wow i would 100% take that and redo my floors, and my neighbors floors, and my parents…
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u/ExternalGiraffe9631 Apr 01 '26
Our local flooring and cabinetry manufacturer's give their drop away. They post their drops every few hours and it's gone by the end of the day. During Covid my husband and I had a good side earning by picking up the long drop and bundling up 1' lengths for kindling, $5 bundle. Campers loved it.
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u/Spartanman321 Apr 01 '26
Are you sure that's flooring offcuts for a new floor and not all of the old boards from the previous deck? Those all have holes drilled on both ends in as if someone used carriage bolts to attach them to something. That would be very bizarre to pre-drill all of those.
From a liability standpoint, they may not be able to resell the wood if it was pressure treated or stained since those chemicals may be worse off burned than disposed of in a landfill. And even if it is pure cedar, if they guess wrong or the owner did some sort of treatment on their own, it would be on the company for the improper disposal, not their client.
Luckily wood is renewable, and even if this is disposed of, more will grow. And bacteria, fungus, and other organisms can break this down.
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u/Friendly_Escape_1020 Apr 01 '26
How do you know where its going? Maybe they have a deal worked out with some kind of wood product recycler. I cant imagine that pile lasting long no matter where it goes, someone will pick it out.
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u/Hot-Union-2440 Apr 01 '26
But htose aren't flooring? That is rando palsti-wood trim shit.
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u/Troglodytes_Cousin Apr 01 '26
I tried burning similarly looking wood laminate flooring scraps once and had to extinguish it almost immedietely.... smelled horrible that stuff is filled with toxic shit. It might be safe to burn in industrial waste-to-energy plant - but definitely not in home.
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u/Zealousideal_Ad5358 Apr 01 '26
Do you actually know it’s going to landfill? If it’s pure wood, it has a fair amount of value as chips or pellets. Anyone in the business would know this, so if this actually going to a landfill, it’s some kind of composite product that can’t be recycled.
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u/ol-gormsby Apr 01 '26
There's lot of uses for that stuff, agreed.
But putting it in landfill is better than burning it. At least the carbon stays locked up, for a while at least.
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u/Wonderful-Medium7777 Apr 01 '26
Which flooring company?
I wonder if they’re getting tax write-offs for that?
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u/Sheffieldsvc Apr 01 '26
Not debating the point which is that it's wasteful, but that doesn't look like flooring offcuts. All clear grain, holes drilled, all the same length, and rounded edges.
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u/Nosferatattoo Apr 01 '26
At least the trees died for nothing /s
I working in the wood flooring business and all the suppliers we use would never do this.
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u/SnooFloofs9998 Apr 01 '26
When l had a fireplace l would wrap wire around my hardwood floor scraps and burn them like logs.
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u/Strong-Comment-7279 Apr 01 '26
So...you posted an image from an advertisement for the off-cuts?
This is how construction works, and how ethical disposal of "waste" can work!
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u/papitaquito Apr 01 '26
Idk those all look like they have holes in them which would imply they have been removed, not drop cuts.
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u/SLC-Originals Apr 01 '26
Send it to a salvage yard. They can sell them. As an artist I'm thinking of frames for paintings, sculptures, woodworking projects. These can be useful
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u/brainstorm42 Apr 01 '26
On a totally different perspective, if they get buried in a landfill, that’s 2 and a bit tons of carbon sequestered from the atmosphere.
Of course the same happens if they get used for flooring or construction, but I’m seeing way too many suggest using them as firewood
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u/Beemerba Apr 01 '26
That doesn't even look like it has the picture of wood glued to it, just random lengths of particle board.
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Apr 01 '26
As a hobby woodworker who built 3 work benches and several pieces of furniture all from free scrap while working at a hardware store, it kills me to know how much useable material gets thrown out. My plan down the road is to get a side hustle going with small furniture made entirely from scrap like this. It's free real estate!
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u/rvralph803 Apr 02 '26
Looks like MDF or some form of manufactured plank.
Are you certain it isn't being recycled? I'd be willing to bet its in a dumpster, but not necessarily bound for a landfill.
A company producing this many offcuts would almost certainly want to close a loop on a potential revenue stream.
At the very least this would cost thousands to dump, and they would at least break even selling it off or allowing another company to take it for recycling.
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u/human-aftera11 Apr 01 '26
They should post it on a local marketplace, there is an industry where I live and leave their used tarps on the property and allow the public to take them for free. Someone from the company just needs to take the initiative.