Great idea hu? DON"T DO IT! I should have submitted this one in the worst smoking mistakes post last week!
Part One: I had a buddy in Oregon who ran a commercial smokehouse, he used to provide me with 50 pound bags of "Tragger" pellets. I used them quite a lot with good results. I brought some down to Houston when I moved here and the humidity soon returned them to the sawdust from which they were made. I still burned them anyway with no problem.
Part Two: While still in Oregon another buddy who worked in an Alder mill told me that they sold their sawdust to a company that made pellets for wood stoves. So I got to thinking I'd try using the pellet stove pellets for smoking some salmon as I used alder for that anyway. BAD IDEA!!!!!!
The pellets made for pellet stoves are compressed with a phenolic binder to keep them from doing what my food grade Tragger pellets did in Texas. Phenolic are not just toxic, they taste like a cross between dog **** and plastic, with a touch of burned hair thrown in. The wood they were made from would have Bent fine, the binder will ruin everything, fortunately it smells so bad you wouldn't think of eating it and being poisoned in the process. It was a dumb idea anyway because my buddy provided me with all the alder I could ever want, but I just had to try it and ended up with some salmon my cat wouldn't touch.