Evergreen Park teen designs recycled firelog for the homeless

EVERYGREEN PARK, Ill. — While hot temperatures have only just returned to Chicagoland, the frigid winter weather will soon be back and an Evergreen Park teen is ready thanks to one of his unique designs.

On a warm day in June, Bill Duffner and his grandfather are thinking about the cold.

Duffner recently designed a recycled firelog for the homeless and with his grandpa’s help, he has been able to take it to a whole new level.

Each of the bricks is made of pressed paper and sawdust and can burn for 45 minutes.

“The bricks are made out of 100% recycled paper and just some water. What happens once you shred them down, it makes them into a pulp and you just press them into the bricks and they produce about 45 minutes to an hour of heat for each two bricks that you use, and it’s an immense amount of heat,” Bill said.

18-year-old Bill just graduated from East Peoria Community High School

and it was during his years playing in the Mustangs outfield when the idea came to him.

“I baseball, in the beginning of the season it’s super cold and I couldn’t imagine being out in the winter all year without any heat,” Bill said.

Bill named the initiative “Heat4Homeless” and enlisted the help of his grandfather and together, they turned the temperature up a notch at Big Bill’s shop.

“He called me up, I think it was in November, and said ‘Hey Grandpa I’m making these bricks’ and I was like ‘What are you talking about,'” Bill said. “I think he was calling me up hoping I’d say ‘Well bring it to the shop,’ and I fell for it and we wound up at the shop and we started building the equipment to put it together and it just took off from there. It was a great, great process of interacting with him trying to come up with ideas.”

Together the two designed everything from the presses to the racks, to the oven. They enlisted the neighboring fence business, Bespoke Fence, for its leftover sawdust and owner Dan Pappas was happy to help.

In a million years I wouldn’t have thought it would be going to something this cool,” Papas said.

The Duffners work with a homeless advocacy group to hand out the firelogs and the men and women living on the streets last winter were incredibly thankful.

In a couple of months, Bill is off to Butler University, but until then, they will keep working away and stockpiling the firelogs.

Bill said he plans to be back and forth regularly to continue this labor of love and says his mother is his inspiration.