How our CleanTech woodchip-burning technology works.

Meister Cheese Company and Muscoda Protein Products together are one of the few dairy businesses in the entire country that rely on a renewable energy source. And by doing so we’ve reduced our natural gas purchases by about 600,000 therms per year—enough to heat more than 650 homes.

Every four days we transfer roughly 100 tons of waste woodchips from our next-door neighbor’s hardwood sawmill to an electronically sophisticated storage bunker on our premises. This is a distance of a few hundred feet where previously they were trucking these woodchips a few hundred miles to get rid of them!

Hydraulically driven scrapers in the bunker automatically move the wood to a conveyor belt, which delivers it to a metering bin. There, the wood is weighed and pneumatically transported to the furnace, where it’s burned at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

The combustion process is digitally controlled by an oxygen trim system, draft controls, and modulating master controls. This makes the burning so efficient that the process is almost literally pollution free, turning about 27 tons of waste woodchips per day into about a single drum of flyash per day, which we capture and recycle.

See a video about our CleanTech wood-burning technology here.