July 3, 2019

Talk about a way to turn ax-throwing into a true power play.

Escape 605 has started partnering with POET to recycle the wood waste from its used wooden target boards.

A crew from POET Biorefining – Chancellor and Mueller Pallets spent an afternoon in downtown Sioux Falls recently loading 6,000 used wooden target boards from Escape 605.

The world’s largest ethanol producer, POET, has partnered with a regional family-owned pallet company, Mueller Pallets, to use the recycled wood waste to run POET Biorefining in Chancellor.

“We’ve been collecting the used target boards at our downtown Escape 605 space since we opened because we didn’t want it to be landfill at the city dump. We wanted to do better and find a way to recycle it,” said Dustin Hoffman, co-owner of Escape 605.

“Knowing that all these boards were going to be recycled by a zero-waste company (Mueller) to help power one of POET’s plants was an easy choice for us.

POET Biorefining – Chancellor and Mueller Pallets have been working together for more than a decade, with the pallet company supplying almost a billion tons of wood to date. Wood waste is ground up into 3-inch chips by Mueller Pallets and then sent over to POET Chancellor where it’s used to run the boiler to produce ethanol.

This process at POET Chancellor is a flagship program for the biofuels producer in using diversified energy to run its biorefining plant, reducing its use of natural gas and further lowering its carbon footprint. The Chancellor site is one of only a handful of biofuel plants that supply ethanol to California, a state with stricter green rules on bioprocessing.

“This is a unique process of turning biomass into green energy. And the most exciting thing is that it’s in our backyard for anyone to use. It’s a great option for people and businesses who want to be more responsible about wood waste disposal, their carbon footprint, while decreasing landfill in our area dumps,” said Rachel Kloos, plant manager at POET Biorefining – Chancellor.