Ladenburger builds a new pellet plant.
The company thereby closes a gap in the complete utilisation of all raw and residual materials generated

The complete utilisation of the raw material, wood, has long since been on the agenda at Holzwerke Ladenburger. By constructing its own pellet plant, the company is closing a gap in this recycling process. “In future we will be able to process our residual materials, such as wood shavings, ourselves in an economically viable way,” says the Ladenburger project planner, Christoph Rettenmeier. Until now, the wood shavings produced during processing have been treated as waste materials and collected by third-party companies. In a few months time, the large pellet unit will turn the residual materials incurred in the production of glued laminated timber – at the large plant in the Bopfingen industrial area – into so-called ENplus wood pellets for domestic heating systems. These will then be sold on to the wholesale trade. Delivering pellets to private customers is not yet planned.

Ladenburger considers itself thoroughly competitive in the production of pellets and marketing them itself. “We are able to completely bypass the cost-intensive process of purchasing wood waste materials. This is not only an advantage for our company in economic terms, it also improves our eco balance somewhat,” says Joachim Hoffmann from the Ladenburger marketing department. Engineer, Thomas Schoch, from Ladenburger adds a few words about the technical details of the new pellet unit. “Here at the Bopfingen site, for the time being we using a pellet press to produce with a capacity of five tonnes of pellets per hour. The plan is to expand the facility by adding another pellet press. The finished pellets will be stored in a 20-metre-high silo, which has a storage capacity of 4190 cubic metres. We collect the residual wood material at three places in production and feed it via pipelines directly to a large collection container,” says Schoch explaining the technical background. It is planned to put the new pellet unit into operation at the end of October 2020.