About Ábhar Materials

Built by people who know wood manufacturing

7th-generation woodworkers turned materials innovators — solving a problem we lived firsthand: what to do with the wood waste a workshop produces.

Why Ábhar

Raw material in the wrong place, not rubbish

"Ábhar" is the Irish word for material — the raw stuff a thing is made from. It's a fitting name for a company built on the belief that the wood waste coming off a workshop floor is raw material in the wrong place, not rubbish.

We grew up in the wood trade, so we know the sawdust skip and the disposal bill firsthand. Ábhar exists to close that loop: we collect the sawdust and offcuts your production generates and turn them into circular, bio-based panels — keeping the fibre in use instead of burned or buried.

Ábhar bio-composite panels made from recovered wood fibre

The Team

The people behind the process

Conor Fay

Founder & CEO

7th-generation woodworker and former Operations Manager at The Carpentry Store, Kildare. First Class Honours in Furniture Design & Manufacture (ATU Connemara) and First Class Masters in Business Management (Maynooth University). Leads commercial strategy, collection partnerships, manufacturing optimisation, and investor relations.

ATU Connemara Maynooth University New Frontiers Phase 1, 2 & 3 Award Winning

Christopher Fay

CTO

Agricultural Science student at UCD with a specialist focus on bio-based materials and the bio-economy. Oversees mycelium growth process development on agricultural and sawdust waste feedstocks, enabling the structural panel formulations at the heart of the Ábhar process.

UCD Agricultural Science Mycelium Process Lead Bio-Economy Specialist

Track Record

Working partners, and the backing behind us

2+ Feedstock Partners

Active wood-waste supply agreements with Irish joinery facilities, confirming feedstock availability and process compatibility.

Enterprise Ireland Supported

New Frontiers Phase 1, 2 & 3: backing our R&D and rollout.

Award Winning

Irish National Startup Awards — 3rd Place Sustainable Startup 2025 & JCI Ireland Creative Young Entrepreneur National Winner 2025.

TCD Innovation

Completed R&D collaboration with Trinity College Dublin, validating the structural panel formulations with a co-authored paper from our research.

We grew up in the wood trade, so the sawdust skip and the disposal bill are problems we know first-hand. Ábhar exists to take that material off the workshop's hands and put it back to use as panels.

— Conor Fay, Founder & CEO, Ábhar Materials

7th

generation woodworker behind Ábhar

Kildare

where we collect and make the panels

Supported By

Grant & programme partners

Enterprise Ireland

Co-funding our R&D towards a cleaner future

Kildare Local Enterprise Office

Regional enterprise support & funding

TU Dublin Tallaght

New Frontiers Phase 2 Programme

Trinity College Dublin

R&D collaboration & co-authored research

Want to work with us?

Whether you've wood waste to put back into the loop, or you're a specifier, investor or partner — let's talk.

For Manufacturers → Get in Touch