Saving by Using Manufactured Components

Using structural building components can save 25 percent of your total wood usage, as well as reduce your on-site waste by 75 percent. So how is this savings achieved at the truss plant? What happens to all the waste created by production? ''Environmentally-friendly'' has been a hot topic for many years now, and Reliable Truss and Components is proud to tell you that zero wood waste from our truss production goes to landfills.

Truss Design
Our design staff strives to optimize every truss to use the least amount of lumber possible, then another dedicated team (called "cutters") considers the best lumber usage for each individual truss based on our current inventory. Can we move a splice to cut two sections out of one longer board and minimize waste? Our cutters review every single truss with this specific task in mind. They are also trained to work as QC on the initial design, building quality into your trusses up front

Sawing
Reliable Truss and Components stocks lumber in 2' gradations in most of the lumber grades we carry. This means that we stock 2x4 in 8', 10', 12', 14', etc. If we need a 12'6" piece of lumber, we cut it out of a 14' board, leaving only 18" of waste. If we only stocked 12' and 16' lengths, we would be discarding 3'6". This way we can minimized the waste of cutdowns to about only 10 percent.

Waste Recovery
Blocks, vented or solid, are commonly 22-7/16" and 14-7/16" in length. We have a special saw to recover these lengths from our discarded scraps.

Pieces shorter than 14-7/16" but longer than 9" or otherwise unsuitable for cutting into blocks are sold to a spliner, someone who fingerjoints short pieces back into 2x4s. While these fingerjointed studs can’t be used in our engineered wood trusses, they are used for wall construction, where they help earn points for various green building programs such as LEED.

Our shortest pieces, from 9" to sawdust, all go to our sawdust manufacturing machine that grinds it up to where we can resell it to other manufacturers, such as wood pellet plants.

Amount of lumber discarded into landfills by Reliable Truss: Zero!

Other Conservation Methods:

• We recycle all lumber wraps, the white coverings on lumber lifts, which become used in products such as manufactured composite decking.
• We break up leftover wood pallets to burn for fuel and give away the ones that we can't use for local homeowners to take for free to burn in their fireplaces.
• Any damaged plates or other discarded metal is recovered by a local steel salvager.
• We service our own trucks and forklifts, so we know that all of the discarded oil, old parts, batteries, and so on are recycled.

Energy Conservation by Design
Trusses allow for simplified construction with lower waste, but they have other advantages as well. Roof trusses can be designed with raised heel heights to allow for more insulation at the roof edge, often called "energy heels". Rather than pinching your insulation down to 4" at the wall, a simple 1' raise will allow you to place R-38 insulation or better right over the top of the wall.

Please see our Green page for more information about the environmental advantages of engineered roof and floor trusses.