Industry-wide, Australian hardwood sawmilling recovers around 41% of a log's volume as sawn timber of any grade — meaning well over half of every log becomes sawdust, offcuts and residue before a single board is even graded. Lifewood recovers a minimum of 70% from the Blackbutt flooring and Spotted Gum flooring logs we buy.
That gap is the whole story behind this post, and it's worth explaining honestly rather than just quoting the headline number — because it isn't just a manufacturing statistic to me. Solving it is one of the reasons Lifewood's Stabilised Solid® technology exists at all.
Hardwood log recovery has always run lower than softwood recovery, and low recovery was the first real challenge our floorboard technology was built to solve. The first timber mill I owned, together with my business partner, was in Donnybrook, Western Australia. The logs available to us — from farmers, from mining sites, and other small parcels — were mostly small, and the rest of the industry didn't want them.
Rather than turn that timber away, we built our own mill around it, and used it to make the first versions of the Lifewood Stabilised Solid floorboard. By using the short boards, the narrow pieces and the wood the rest of the industry treated as waste as construction material for the floorboard itself, we achieved recoveries higher than the industry had seen — not just a better-looking product, but a more stable one, built from the entire log rather than only the best cuts out of it.
At the time, typical hardwood recovery in the West Australian industry sat around 30–35% of the log; the rest was burnt or turned into woodchip. Our process changed that, and it's genuinely why the technology was worth pursuing in the first place — it was a revolutionary product for the WA hardwood timber industry.
As demand for the floorboard grew, so did the mill. We upgraded to larger milling equipment on the same Donnybrook site, able to process bigger volumes of the same small, difficult logs the rest of the industry still didn't want — the log yard behind it filled with exactly the kind of stock that a conventional mill would have turned away.
That same technology is what later let Lifewood diversify into French Oak, Black Walnut, Spotted Gum, Blackbutt and the other species in the range you see today.
The Donnybrook mill didn't close because the model stopped working. It closed because the Western Australian state government closed down the state's native timber industry. When that happened, Lifewood moved its milling operations to Vietnam, where we now operate a bandsaw sawmill built around the same principle: very high recoveries and effectively no-waste sawmilling. The site and the country changed; the standard didn't. Our Vietnam facility exists to carry on the same practice we started with in Donnybrook — full utilisation of a genuinely precious resource, a hardwood log — and it's the same standard we apply today to the Blackbutt flooring and Spotted Gum flooring we buy here in Australia.
ABARES' National Wood Processing Survey 2016–17 puts Australia-wide hardwood sawlog recovery at 41.2%, ranging from 39.6% to 47.3% depending on mill scale. A separate peer-reviewed study on plantation eucalypt found nominal board recovery of 43.6% before dressing, falling to just 31.4% after dressing and machining — roughly two-thirds of the log lost to sawdust, offcuts and machining loss by the time a board is finished. International data from the FAO's Asia-Pacific Forestry Commission shows a similar range, 42–60%, averaging around 51%, with poorly equipped mills as low as 30–40%.
And that's recovery of sawn product at any grade. The share that clears a premium, appearance-grade bar is smaller again — often well under 20% of the original log, sometimes in the 5–15% range once you combine sawmill recovery with premium-grade selection. Most mills are chasing that premium fraction specifically, which is exactly why they tend to buy only the best few logs out of any given harvest.
We recover a minimum of 70% from the Blackbutt flooring and Spotted Gum flooring logs we buy today, using the same principle that started in Donnybrook: we buy standard-grade logs, not premium ones. Our Stabilised Solid® construction — a cross-engineered core rather than a single solid-sawn plank, which is what places it firmly in the engineered timber flooring category rather than traditional solid-sawn boards — is built specifically to recover flooring-grade timber from logs a traditional solid-sawn mill would mostly reject or downgrade. Finger-jointing and cross-lamination are established, real techniques for using shorter, narrower or lower-grade pieces that solid milling discards as offcuts, converting them into usable structural and appearance product instead.
The consequence that actually matters: because we don't need the premium fraction, the farmers and foresters we buy from can sell their whole harvest from a thinning operation, not just the best few stems. That's the detail that makes thinning a paddock properly worth doing — see our post on why the farmers behind our Blackbutt flooring and Spotted Gum flooring are thinning, not clearing for the full picture of how that connects back to the paddock itself, and why farm forestry is becoming a bigger part of Australia's hardwood story more broadly.
It doesn't go to landfill. At our manufacturing facility in Vietnam, the sawdust and offcuts from milling fuel an on-site boiler that heats the kiln dry room, bringing every hardwood floorboard to the correct moisture content using residue from the same log it came from. Using mill residue to fuel kiln drying isn't unique to Lifewood — it's a well-documented practice across the Australian hardwood industry, with case studies including Big River Timbers running a 428kW steam engine off residue, and Gympie Timber Company running a 240kW system off thermal oil from its drying kilns. What is specific to our process is that it's confirmed, on-site, and closes the loop on the same log: standard-grade logs in, a minimum of 70% recovered as flooring, and the remainder becoming the fuel that dries what's left.
No. We deliberately buy standard-grade Blackbutt flooring and Spotted Gum flooring logs, because our Stabilised Solid® process is built to recover flooring-grade timber from them — which is also what allows the farmers and foresters we source from to sell their whole harvest, not just the best few stems.
Yes, measurably. It's well above the ABARES-documented Australia-wide average of around 41% for sawn hardwood product of any grade, and further still above what a traditional mill recovers once premium-grade selection is factored in.
At our manufacturing facility in Vietnam, they fuel an on-site boiler that heats the kiln dry room, using the same log's own residue to dry the boards that log produced.
It started at Lifewood's first mill in Donnybrook, Western Australia, working with small logs from farmers and mining sites that the rest of the industry didn't want. When the Western Australian state government closed down the state's native timber industry, Lifewood moved milling operations to Vietnam, where we now run a bandsaw sawmill built on the same principle — very high recoveries and effectively no-waste sawmilling. Using the short boards, narrow pieces and waste wood as construction material for the floorboard itself is what let Lifewood recover far more of the log than the WA industry average of the time — around 30–35% — and that same principle is now applied to Blackbutt flooring and Spotted Gum flooring in the eastern states.
See the finished result on the Blackbutt floorboards and Spotted Gum floorboards product pages, or download our price guide to compare both against the rest of the range.