In the US alone, around 37 million tons of wood waste is thrown away according to Eric Law, co-founder and CEO of Urban Machine. That’s about half of what is harvested every year. Source: Forbes
Mr Law saw tremendous opportunity in being able to reclaim used wood from demolition sites, and waste pieces from new construction. He and his Bay-area start-up team are aiming to eliminate that waste and reduce the environmental impact of the construction industry with their Urban Machine.
Mr Law came up with the idea for the company while working in his previous role in the construction industry.
“In my last job I was digging into how to save waste from construction sites,” he explained. “I found that steel and concrete already have recycle paths. But wood is sent to the landfill because of metal.”
Specifically, metal fasteners – nails, screws, and staples that make reclaimed wood uneconomic to reuse.
“I reached out to Andrew (Gillies, the company’s co-founder and CTO), who I’d worked with previously, and asked him, ‘Can we automate this?’”
Andrew recruited Alex Thiele, co-founder and Lead Software Engineer, and they founded the company in late 2021 with the aim of reclaiming lumber, glulam (laminated engineered wood), and heavy timber. A benchtop prototype of their system was completed by Q3 of 2021, and the company raised its pre-seed funding round in Q4 of last year.
Today, the company is fabricating its first production machine. That fast turnaround from prototyping just a year ago relied heavily on recent advances in technology.
“There has been a lot of development in hardware the past few years that made this possible,” said Mr Gillies. “Hardware development today is fast and low-cost, so you can learn by testing against the real world.”
That was critical, since the machine itself involves a bit of a twist on existing concepts. “From a robotics perspective, it’s a reverse pick-and-place machine,” he explained. “It requires perception ‘where are all the fasteners?’ and manipulation ‘how do we get the fasteners out?’”
The production machine currently being built is the company’s fourth iteration in just over a year, so fast development, testing, and iteration have been critical.
The software side, too, benefited from modern tech.
“Andrew has been pumping out a new machine every few months,” added Mr Thiele. “But it’s never been easier to develop software. With machine learning, the focus is on data, and Eric collected lots of lumber from various job sites. We wound up with thousands and thousands of images that fed into that machine learning. Sensor tech is amazing too. We take one picture and immediately have millimetre precision on fastener locations.”
The production machine under construction uses metal detectors and X-ray inspection as well. It’s 80 feet long and has several removal steps where custom end effectors on robotic arms remove nails, screws, and staples from the wood.
The machine fits on two standard trailers and is trucked straight to the jobsite.
“What we end up with is better than new,” said Mr Law. “It’s straight and dry, and since what we work with is often 40 to 100-year-old wood, it’s higher quality than what you can buy today.”
The development of more capable production machinery is also opening new business opportunities.
“Our initial customers are furniture makers, lumber yards, and finish contractors,” Mr Law said. “For volume, though, we’ll have to go into structural lumber and engineered products. Today, dimensional lumber can be graded for structural use, but there is no process for grading glulam as of yet, so we’re starting our own research project to do that.”
Eventually the team envisions automated grading in the machine as well. The team also foresees adding other products, including plywood and siding.
“If we can capture 50% of the waste, that’s an US$18 billion opportunity each year in the US alone,” Mr Law said. “Right now, all that waste goes to landfills here and to incinerators in Europe. We have to reuse it.”
The process saves CO2 emissions from those wastes, and by reducing the amount of new lumber production required.
Initially, Urban Machine will be in the wood business.
“For the first three to five years, we’ll focus on selling salvaged lumber,” said Mr Law. “After that, we’ll be able to decide whether to continue in the wood business, or transition into selling the technology.”
