Asked how he got into heating his high-end woodworking business in Edmonton, Alberta with its own wastewood, Kent Madsen says: “To be perfectly honest, what motivated me to do this was, my partner drove me nuts.”

“This was Myron’s baby,” says Madsen, president of Madsen’s Custom Cabinets, of his now-retired partner, Myron Jonzon. “His daughter was in university, and she did a paper on waste heat—she’s an environmentalist—and she used our shop as a model. We were terrible: a poorly insulated building in northern Canada, our heat bills were crazy.