CalPlant has a Eureka moment at IWF

CalPlant, a manufacturer of sustainably sourced building products in Willows, Calif., introduced Eureka MDF at IWF 2022. Made from rice straw, the interior building material can be used for cabinetry, furniture, molding, and millwork applications.

“Eureka is a game changer,” Geri Freeman, CalPlant’s vice president of sales, marketing and logistics, said in a statement. “We are able to offer our customers a product that helps them win in the marketplace and improve our environment at the same time. Our customers have fueled us along this journey, and we can’t wait to see the product in their hands.”

Eureka is manufactured using post-harvest rice straw, an agricultural waste product, and is engineered to match the performance of traditional wood-based MDF in machinability, paintability and strength, according to CalPlant.

CalPlant sits on a 276-acre property in the Sacramento Valley, which produces 20 percent of the nation’s rice and 1.5 million tons of rice straw every year. The plant features a ContiRoll Generation 9 Siempelkamp continuous press, which is 10’ wide and 117’ long. The mill will be able to produce MDF thicknesses of 2 mm to 32 mm (0.080” to 1.25″).

“For the last two years, we’ve been selling a CalPlant mill run grade product for select applications, and just in these past several months we’ve come out with the Eureka brand,” Elden Reddig, ClaPlant’s regional sales manager, told Woodshop News at the trade show. “Now when we put the Eureka stamp on it, it’s a higher quality, fully backed warrantied product.”

To learn more, visit eurekamdf.com.  

This article was originally published in the October 2022 issue.