Co-Products – Keeping a good thing going

Our mills produce more than just lumber, plywood, and oriented strand board. Because of our dedication to sustainability, diversification, and progressiveness, we work to make sure all fibre goes to a good use. One of the ways we maintain this dedication is through the production of co-products.

That means finding a use and a market for a variety of products. In this, we have become one of the largest non-integrated chip producers in British Columbia, making co-products one of our important businesses.

Creating new uses for old waste

Our co-products include sawmill and plywood residual and whole log chips, sawdust, shavings, and dark hog (bark). We produce approximately one million bone dry units (BDUs) of chips, 500,000 BDUs of sawdust and shavings, and almost 500,000 BDUs of hog. All our co-products ship on trucks — over 100,000 trucks per year.

The main uses for our co-products are: pulp production, paper production, particleboard, MDF, power production, animal bedding, and wood pellets. We use a variety of species for each of these applications, including spruce, pine, interior balsam, hemlock, and Douglas fir. This commitment to finding new and better ways of using our residual fibre will continue to push us forward into a more sustainable future.

We are proud of our ability to use all products derived from the logs delivered to our facilities. It’s this kind of innovation and progressiveness that has kept Tolko vital through 60 years and will continue to push us into the future.

We have facilities across western Canada producing a variety of co-products. These include mills in: