When waste is generated, it goes through a pretty standard chain. It gets collected, stored, sorted, and then transported off-site. From there, it branches depending on the material type. Cardboard and paper can either be recycled if they're clean or landfilled if they're contaminated. Food waste goes to composting. And material from water treatment plants gets dried out and ends up in the landfill too. So even when facilities are doing the right things, sorting, separating, hauling, a lot of this material still ends up in the ground. The system has real leaks.

When wood waste is generated, it gets split into two streams. The accepted stream, meaning clean, fresh, natural wood, can go to recycling, get turned into mulch, or be repurposed. But here's the problem: that accepted stream is actually the minority. The rejected stream, anything painted, treated, engineered, or the wrong size, gets hauled straight to a landfill. And that's 80% of all wood waste generated. Seventy million tonnes of wood waste every year, and the vast majority of it has nowhere to go but the ground.