How to Recycle Wood: 5 Eco-friendly ideas
You must wonder how to recycle all the woods in your home that are no longer useful to you. Well, you are in the right place. We’ll share some of the eco-friendly recycling ideas that you can always apply. Here, we’ll discuss some well-known strategies and share some creative ideas.
There are different types of wood wastes like Sawdust, wood scraps, old wooden furniture, tree branches, etc. We aim to cover all the types to have a piece of complete knowledge of how to recycle woods.
In the following sections, we’ll see five ideas to recycle woods in an eco-friendly way.
1. DIY Projects to Recycle Wood
DIY projects are always so exciting, and you can use your creativity to the fullest. We always recommend this technique to give you a direct recycling experience. Also, it is so motivating to realize that you are helping the world and contributing in your way!
Now we’ll share some of the most incredible DIY projects with woods:
• Wooden Ornaments
It’s always fun to make wooden ornaments as you can use your imagination to the fullest. You have several options like creating rings, necklaces, bracelets, showpieces, etc.
If you already have carpentry tools at home, then that’s great. You can use wood scraps to shape them according to your design and then paint them. You can always check out Etsy and find some brilliant wooden ornament ideas for design inspiration.
However, it is possible that you don’t have carpentry tools at home. For that, the most feasible solution is to find local carpentry services. You can show your drafted ideas, and they will shape wood scraps for you.
• Wooden Plant Holder
This project is always fun as you are supporting another eco-friendly project that you are doing indoors.
This wooden plant holder can be mounted to the wall, and you can put tiny pots in series. You can use wood scraps that are long and strong and then join them all together with essential carpentry tools, steel angles, screws, etc.
And you can always get help from a carpenter if you need help with shaping the wood scraps and all other settings.
• Wooden Phone Stand
Most of the time, we have no specific places to keep our mobiles phones, and sometimes it becomes a challenge to find where we left them. Creating a wooden phone stand would be a great idea to solve this issue.
To create a wooden phone stand, you can use wooden scrap to shape them into two pieces where one piece will support the base and another would be a vertical holder.
You can use a drill machine and connect those pieces with screws or use glue that works on wood.
• Wooden Shadow Boxes
The next creative idea is making shadow boxes on the wall. These wooden shadow boxes can make your interior more natural and give a fresh feeling.
You can always start with finding long and durable wood scraps and cut them according to your design; You can create the design according to your needs. However, to give it a cool look, it’s always great to keep a minimal amount of things such as showpieces, two or three books, etc.
You might need a drill machine, screws, and tiny steel angles to make these boxes. You can always ask for a carpenter’s help to shape the wood scrap or do it by yourself.
• Wooden Photo frame
If you love art and are looking for eco-friendly frames for your artwork, then creating a wooden frame with recycled wood would be great.
You might need a rectangular wood scrap for the background, and for the front frame, you can use four thin scraps and then join them using your carpentry tools.
Next, you can add colors to it. You can try to design the frame as well if you want. Otherwise, you can get help from a carpenter for designing.
• Wooden Shelf
A wooden shelf is usually so helpful to store things. Also, it can give a more natural look to your interior design. Yes, it’s going to be a great project if you can work on it!
It may look a bit challenging at first as finding those big wooden boards can be challenging as we are making using wood waste. But if you have small pieces, you can try to cut them into rectangular shapes and then join them all together to make a mega rectangular board.
Next, you can make boxes using your carpentry tools. You can check out this video on how to make a wooden box with hand tools.
Once you make multiple boxes, you can make a wooden frame to set all the boxes. I am sure this project will be fun even tho it goes through a bit of a long process.
• Wooden Classic ChessBoard
Do you or your kids love to play chess? If yes, then you are going to love this quick project!
First, all you need to do is find a wooden board! If you can’t find that’s okay, you can add multiple wood scraps to shape them into a square. Then use sanding paper to make the surface smooth.
Once this process is done, you can add wood paints on the board to make it into a chessboard!
You can try to make them all at home if you have carpentry tools for the chess pieces. For complex designs, it’s good to make some simplified versions to indicate different pieces. It must be a proud moment whenever you are going to play on this recycled chessboard.
• Wooden Tray
Have you seen all those beautiful wooden trays that people use in the kitchen for serving! I am sure you always wanted to buy them. But now, you can use your wood waste to make those beautiful trays.
To make a wooden tray, you need to gather all the wood scraps and join them in a rectangular shape. Once you are done, you can use wood glue to attach them and finally use sanding paper to make the surface smooth!
You can measure and add the sides all together using glue and screws, Just like a box.
• Open bookshelf
If you are a book lover, you might love to make an open bookshelf to store your books. Wooden bookshelves are classy and beautiful as well.
• Tiny Bird House
Do you like to hear birds chirping in the morning? This is not only a mindful experience but also therapeutic. You can easily collect those wooden scraps and make them into a tiny birdhouse, and then you can place them near a shade.
2. Use Recycling Services for Wood waste
Our next solution is quite simple and easy to execute as the services will do the whole recycling work. We’ll easily explain how to perform this work with the following points!
• Find a Wood Recycle Service nearby
In the age of the internet, this is very simple to do! First, you can Google this search term: Wood Recycle service near me/ your city name
Once you find good-rated services, you can list them down and consider the following factors to find the best for you:
- If their service at your place is available or not!
- If you need to separate nails and other metallic substances from your wood waste.
- Compare Cost.
- Consider quality and quantity of customer reviews, ratings.
Once you have a choice, it’s the way to go!
3. Use Sawdust around Yard and Garden
Until now, we talked about wood scraps a lot. Now we’ll see how to recycle Sawdust in an eco-friendly way effectively!
• Sawdust for plants
The best way to use Sawdust for plants is to spread Sawdust on the ground. Sawdust can help your garden ground to retain moisture and keep the temperature cooler.
But make sure to add a nitrogen component along with your sawdust mixture; otherwise, garden soil might face nitrogen deficiency.
• Sawdust for yard pathway
You can always make yard pathways using Sawdust. It is eco-friendly and biodegradable, which can contribute to the betterment of nature.
You can use tiny wood scraps for the path boundaries to make them more beautiful.
• Sawdust for Cat Litter
Sawdust is an economical and eco-friendly alternative for costly cat litter.
Also, as Sawdust is comparatively large, it’s highly unlikely that dust will be stuck under your cats’ paws.
4. Using woods as a home insulator
In recent times, energy bills have been a common problem for everyone! Well, we have a cheap and eco-friendly solution for that.
We can use recycled wood as insulators on the floor, wall, and roof.
• How can wood insulators save energy bills?
In school physics classes, you must have learned wood is a bad conductor of heat. That means if you consider wood as a boundary of a system, then it can insulate the system from exchanging heat with the surrounding!
Now, if we use woods as natural insulators, they can save more energy bills. For example, if we use woods as home insulators in cold places, we might feel less cold inside the home. Eventually, we don’t have to use electronic/electrical heating machines to that extent.
• How to use wood insulators at home?
- You can use long wooden boards to make a floor-size board for the floor. To bring them in shape you might need to cut them with appropriate measurement.
- Use sawdust on the roof! Just by making a thick layer of sawdust, you can insulate your roof!
- A wooden interior would be a great idea for your wall insulation. To maintain the design, I would recommend discussing with a carpenter or interior designer to use your old wooden scraps and boards.
5. Reselling wooden furniture
If you want to recycle wooden furniture, you can always remodify them with the help of a carpenter service. However, if you think you have no extra place and you need to sell your existing wooden furniture, then an offline or online resell marketplace would be a way to go.
For online reselling, you can either go for Facebook Marketplace or eBay. You can check out how to start selling on those platforms; official websites links are given below!
Conclusion
Eco-friendly wood recycling is a great initiative to make the world greener. While we recommend people work more on DIY projects, reselling old furniture and sending out wood waste to a recycling service are impactful. We really appreciate your initiative and want to say thanks to you. Always remember every small step matters to accomplish a bigger goal.
