Robots to Reclaim Lumber: Bringing Circularity to the Construction Industry with Andrew Gillies from Urban Machine

Hardware to Save a Planet

In this episode of Hardware to Save a Planet, Dylan welcomes Andrew Gillies, Co-Founder and CTO at Urban Machine, a company focused on converting wood waste into premium lumber products.

Join us as we delve into Urban Machine’s sustainability drive of protecting virgin lumber in forests using robots and sustainable power to reclaim and recycle wood waste into value-added lumber products. Learn more about the company’s business model and the hardware behind the solution. Listen to the episode and get inspired to positively impact the planet by finding your own tangent in the climate space.

Andrew is an engineer, entrepreneur, and team builder with a Ph.D. in biomechanical engineering from UC Berkeley. Before Urban Machine, he co-founded Dash Robotics, where he developed and shipped hundreds of thousands of consumer robots. Andrew has also worked on robotics for agriculture, solar power, and solar panel cleaning. As the Co-Founder and CTO at Urban Machine, Andrew is on a mission to convert the 37 million tons of wood waste from construction and demolition into high-volume, locally sourced, premium lumber products valued at $18 billion annually.

Episode resources

• Andrew Gillies on LinkedIn
• Urban Machine website
• Dylan Garrett on LinkedIn
• Synapse website

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Previous guests include: Peter Reinhardt of Charm Industrial, Carlos Araque of Quaise, Noah McQueen of Heirloom, Areeb Malik of Glacier, Jeff Satwicz of Bigbelly, Abe Schneider of Natel Energy, Insiya Jafferjee of Shellworks, Paul Gross of Remora, Erika Boeing of Accelerate Wind and Daniel Betts of Blue Frontier.
Check out our three most downloaded episodes:

• A Sustainable Approach to Direct Air Capture with Noah McQueen, Head of Research & Co-Founder of Heirloom
• Innovative Waste Recycling: AI and Robotics with Areeb Malik, Co-founder of Glacier
• Developing an Environmentally-Friendly and Fish-Saving Hydropower Turbine with Abe Schneider, Co-founder and CTO of Natel Energy

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