Due to illness, growth or just outdated age, roughly 36 million timber come down annually in cities throughout the US. And with extra ferocious storms ripping by our landscapes — to not point out a altering local weather’s affect on our tree’s ecosystems — that quantity will solely enhance. (The hundreds of timber at present falling throughout California are a distressing instance of that truth.)
When downed in an city surroundings a overwhelming majority of timber are burned, mulched or landfilled, their embedded carbon and an estimated $786 million in annual financial worth misplaced to the ether.
In the meantime, our nation’s ample urge for food for wooden merchandise solely grows. With a collective consumption behavior of 50 billion board ft of lumber annually, throwing away these fallen commodities appears not simply wasteful, however downright silly.
One has to marvel, why would you waste good wooden?
Enter the City Wooden Challenge
The tossing of downed timber is far the identical because the demolition of outdated constructing materials, a subject I expounded upon a number of brief months in the past. Fairly than leveraging the fabric we’ve available with a little bit of gumption and elbow grease, we throw it away in lieu of the brand new. As I famous then, we’d like “extra distributed organizations inside the deconstruction and reuse sector [to] broaden the market’s choices, with the added bonus of constructing resilience and financial exercise in native communities.”
That’s why I used to be delighted to listen to about the City Wooden Challenge.
Shaped in 2018 beneath the auspices of the USDA Forest Service, the City Wooden Challenge started in Baltimore when social service enterprise Humanium and trendy home-furnishings model Room & Board helped kind a singular public-private partnership.
Reclaiming wooden from constructions slated for demolition and concrete timber eliminated for illness, upkeep and storm injury, the venture created jobs for these with obstacles to employment whereas diverting waste from landfill and carbon from the environment. In flip, Room & Board created distinctive furnishings items from the precious, salvaged materials. The consequence? A win, win, win, benefiting town of Baltimore socially, environmentally and economically.
Since its inception, the City Wooden Challenge has collectively rescued an estimated 180,000 board ft of lumber and expanded sourcing throughout the US, leveraging materials from Anaheim and Sacramento in California; Detroit, Minneapolis and — most lately — New York Metropolis.
We attempt to make the most of extra renewable and recycled supplies wherever attainable. Partnering with cities throughout the nation to divert city wooden from landfills and to create a round provide chain aligns with our long-term imaginative and prescient.
In its latest incarnation, Room & Board has united with Tri-Lox, a Brooklyn, New York-based millwork and design operation. Collectively they’re tapping into decommissioned water tanks that dot New York’s iconic skyline and including to Room & Board’s reclamation efforts. All informed, the corporate diverts an estimated 200 timber yearly from the waste stream and presents roughly 30 merchandise sourced from the venture’s lumber.
To study extra concerning the City Wooden Challenge, I emailed some inquiries to Emily McGarvey, director of sustainability at Room & Board. The next alternate has been edited for size and readability.
Suz Okie: Why is the City Wooden Challenge a strategic precedence for Room & Board?
Emily McGarvey: Wooden is our most-used materials. Sourcing it responsibly simply is sensible. And with 90 % of our merchandise manufactured in the US, we’re in a singular place to maintain supplies and manufacturing inside the nation.
Since our founding in 1980, sustainable practices have been basic to our firm. As a founding member of the Sustainable Furnishings Council, we acknowledge there’s extra to do, from higher sourcing and extra accountable supplies to investing within the well-being of individuals and communities. Our aspiration is to be a sustainability chief that positively impacts society and the world. We prioritize social and environmental points based mostly on their materials significance to Room & Board [and] have organized our high precedence points into three pillars: Higher Merchandise; Higher for Folks; and Higher for the Planet.
In that vein, we prioritize American craft, trend-proof type and being sustainable by design. We attempt to make the most of extra renewable and recycled supplies wherever attainable. Partnering with cities throughout the nation to divert city wooden from landfills and to create a round provide chain aligns with our long-term imaginative and prescient. We are able to prioritize this venture due to sturdy management help and clients that convey these heirloom high quality merchandise into their houses.
Okie: Inform me a bit concerning the City Wooden Challenge’s New York Metropolis growth and the wooden you’re sourcing there.
McGarvey: Every metropolis presents a singular alternative. In New York Metropolis, our companion Tri-Lox is popping decommissioned water towers into the Millbridge Frames (out there now) and the Artemis Tub assortment (launches in April). These decommissioned water towers are made out of Californian Redwoods and Alaskan Cedar.
Tri-Lox can also be piloting with the NYC Park System to make use of salvaged oak timber and rework them into Stanley Wall Cabinets (launching in late January 2023). The town is discovering that as its water desk rises on account of local weather change, a few of its timber is not going to react nicely. These timber embrace London airplane sycamore and white and pink oak.
We’re piloting options as these timber will in the end must be changed with species that may react higher to a altering local weather.
Okie: What challenges has Room & Board encountered in leveraging reclaimed materials?
McGarvey: We’re constructing a round provide chain for city wooden with many companions. It’s thrilling to be a part of the method and does require persistence and adaptability. In our efforts, we’ve seen three principal challenges.
- Design: Turning materials destined for the waste stream into lovely, heirloom-quality furnishings will be an unimaginable design problem. Our designers are creatively designing merchandise to the reclaimed wooden’s highest worth by understanding its distinctive high quality and character and likewise by assembly our design ethos: timeless and trendy, pure supplies, artisan crafted and prime quality.
- Sourcing: Inside this new round system, the provision chain must be related and typically created. By partnering with the federal government, nonprofits, startups and current distributors, Room & Board helps the creation of the provision chain wanted to take the fabric from city areas to preprocessing to manufacturing and, lastly, to Room & Board showrooms. This takes persistence and adaptability for a provide chain to develop that did not beforehand exist.
- Scale: To in the end scale reclaimed wooden, there’s a want for a constant and dependable amount of high quality wooden. And extra dimensional lumber is required to create high-volume gadgets like eating room tables and dressers. Because the round provide chain grows and matures, it’s going to change into extra environment friendly, bringing prices nearer to mainstream prices. That can enable extra corporations to hitch us in utilizing extra reclaimed wooden.
As McGarvey suggests, extra organizations, partnerships and hyperlinks within the provide chain are wanted to construct a sturdy system for reuse and reclamation of city wooden. However for these prepared to place within the effort, there are financial and environmental financial savings for the taking: Very similar to the cities inside which they fall, every downed tree represents a singular alternative.
On the threat of repeating myself, from the place I sit the additional effort feels “nicely value it.”
