Turning waste into warmth

October 6, 2025 | WONDER | 4 minute read

At Holkham, we’re always striving to be more sustainable by working on our three ‘WONDER’ goals. In this journal we talk with Liam, our Workshop Supervisor, about how they’re stamping out waste by transforming leftover sawdust into briquettes for our staff and tenants to purchase.  

1. What inspired the idea to start making briquettes from leftover sawdust? Basically reduce the waste and to reduce the cost of getting rid of the waste basically. It just seems a bit counterproductive to pay to get rid of something we could actually make a little bit of money from and cut down on our skip cost at the same time.
2. Roughly how much sawdust is reused?So, before we had the briquette maker, the waste sawdust would go into a skip which would need to be replaced around once a fortnight. The skip company could spread some of it on fields, but we wanted a skip-less solution to cut down on carbon and cost. Now, the briquette machine can run by itself and turns off automatically after it detects there’s nothing else to process, we just need someone to change the bags once they’re full.
3. Did you have any challenges in getting this idea off the ground? The initial challenge was convincing the Land and Property department to spend the money. Ron (the carpentry supervisor) had previously worked for a company that used one and had seen then benefit and that whilst we might not make a huge amount of money from selling the briquettes but we would massively reduce our skip consumption so save on cost there, reducing the amount of waste that gets sent to landfill, and the reducing our carbon by cutting down on the amount lorries need to come and collect the full skips and at the same time provide a valuable resource for our staff and Holkham tenants. We did have a small challenge once we began. Originally we used plastic bags for the briquettes which felt really wasteful, so I sourced a paper bag producer instead and the marketing team designed us a reusable stamp to brand the bags.
4. What’s the uptake like? The initial uptake was a little too good! We had some people asking for 20 bags in the early autumn which would mean we would run out before Christmas – so we now have to limit the quantity per person to make sure there’s enough for everyone heading into the colder months.
5. Do you still use them to stock the holiday lets? Yes, each let gets a bag to use whilst they stay at Holkham. Also Amy (Lettings manager) has set up a monthly donation of four bags to Wells Hospital food bank to be given to people struggling with the winter fuel costs.
6. What other kinds of waste materials do you think could be reused on the estate? The leftover coffee grinds from the cafés were suggested to create coffee logs, however the machine can only compress things with less than 16% moisture otherwise it damages the machine. So we’d have to send them to be dried which would then add cost and we can compost them which is a good alternative. We have started adding in finely shredded paper, longer pieces tend to get tangled but small bits work well. We’re always looking for ways to reduce our waste and maximize the use of our machines.