The best use for trees needing to be removed from an urban setting, many people will agree, is to harvest and mill their wood to be used in carbon-sequestering construction and woodworking activities. If that is to happen at scale, however, this best use must be economically more appealing than is simply to dump those trees into a landfill or to burn them.
To optimize the economics of urban wood, its commercial aspects need to be better formalized and monetized, emphasizes Jennifer Alger, who has long been an energetic organizer and promoter in developing the business side of rescuing and marketing urban, salvaged, and reclaimed lumber. She sees opportunity to strengthen the urban wood movement through product certification analogous to that occurring today in the traditional lumbering and forest products segments, by tracking urban wood products’ origins and chains of custody, and through facilitating online markets in these products.
As described in an earlier BlueGreen Minute (“Urban lumber prolongs trees’ value to the community”), urban lumber is wood sawn from trees grown within the very community where it finds its final use in construction and woodworking projects. The aims are for urban trees and wood to be put to their highest and best uses in ways that maximize their economic, environmental, and societal benefits for people within that community and beyond.
Although the idea of wood as a building and crafting material that sequesters carbon and potentially has a smaller carbon footprint than do other materials remains a subject of debate, already today there are architects, builders, and end-customers who very much care about the source of wood they use. If a material is being sold as “urban wood,” then a reputable builder dare not take the chance that such wood, after it has been incorporated into a structure, will be found, for example, to have originated in an Amazon rain forest cleared for growing soybeans.
That’s where certification and tracking chain of custody come in.
“We don’t get requests for certification from the person coming in to buy a burl cookie, or a one-off slab, or one unit of lumber to do their kitchen. They’re not super concerned with it,” Jennifer relates, “but when you start getting more into the commercial aspects, those buyers want to know. In order to buy at any scale, our commercial buyers need to know that each one of these small producers is adhering to a standard so that they can protect themselves should they buy the product.”
Can I offer you a cookie? Jennifer Alger shows off a nut-tree cookie salvaged from a local orchard.
Repurposing urban wood before it had a name
Representing her family’s 4th generation in the wood business, Jennifer is president of Far West Forest Products (https://farwestforest.com/), based in Sheridan, California. Her father, Jim Evans, the company’s founder, was involved with urban wood years before anybody had thought to give it a name. As a girl, Jennifer had watched her dad repurposing urban trees not necessarily out of any altruistic motivation but because that is how he fed his family during the winter months of the year.
Like his own father and grandfather, Jim had worked in the traditional logging industry. Conventional logging was more of a summer thing in Northern California, so in winter he would buy city people’s dying, damaged, or otherwise problematic trees. The highest-quality materials he cut were sold for lumber or high-value uses, the remainder as packaged firewood.
The business has changed considerably in recent decades. Several factors contributed to the transformation, including public and government concerns about overstuffed landfills, a change in milling technology, new public attitudes and trends, and, somewhat indirectly, the emerald ash borer crisis further east.
Urban wood’s different history in the West
Our previous BlueGreen Minute about urban wood (“Urban lumber prolongs trees’ value to the community”) presented an admittedly rather Midwestern perspective and with a lot of attention to the emerald ash borer crisis of the early 2000s that decimated the ash tree population from much of the Midwest to the Northeast. Because the Western states have a bit different history, we asked Jennifer to tell us a little about that.
To this day, thankfully, emerald ash borer has not yet made its way to California and to most areas west of the corridor of U.S. states from the Dakotas south to Oklahoma. The main impetus in California to do something more sensible with urban trees needing to be cut was a 1990s state law mandating that communities reduce the amount of solid wood waste going into California’s landfills.
“At that time in California our landfills already were maxing out,” Jennifer explains, “and you know that meant they also were emitting carbon, and so people were trying to figure out a solution for it… Well, it turns out that a lot of what was going into landfills was (perfectly good) saw logs… Now, companies like ours were already happily milling that wood. We just weren’t calling it urban.”
One of the reasons so much good wood had been going into landfills (and still does to this day in some parts of the country) is because disposal by dumping was cheaper than trucking logs to a sawmill, whose operators might not be much interested in nonuniform urban logs to begin with. Moreover, urban-source logs not untypically contain grown-in nails, cable and other hardware.
Jim Evans examines a slab of mineral-stained Tulip Poplar originating from a residence near the Sacramento River. It would have been shame if this had gone to a landfill!
A game-changer for the Evans family and for much of the urban wood segment (as we have heard, too, from others in the movement) came when they acquired one of the newly developed and commercialized Wood-Mizer-brand portable bandsaw mills. These relatively low-cost sawmills brought new flexibility and possibilities to milling. “The Wood-Mizer made it possible for us to mill a lot of different things that previously we hadn’t been able to take,” Jennifer notes. “We really switched over to producing lumber and were able to do what we had been doing earlier but on a much larger scale.”
About that time, Jennifer was just taking over managerial responsibility for the family business. From a marketing point of view, she came to realize that what made their company different from others was the raw material source. “We got our logs from an urban source, from urban trees that had been removed,” she relates. “We got our reclaimed material from deconstruction sites, from wood that had been in a structure previously. And we also used salvaged logs. So, these could be logs that came maybe from along the highways, a highway removal for a road expansion. Or there could be some giant sequoia redwoods that fell in a storm. The common denominator was that none of these were being harvested for their timber value.”
Changing attitudes about tree-cutting
Upon doing some research, Jennifer began to learn about the carbon benefits of keeping this wood in its reshaped but otherwise intact form as a building and woodworking material. Public attitudes about wood and logging also were shifting somewhat. Jennifer recalls that during her childhood logging had been frowned upon because people associated it with killing trees and damaging the environment. There had been some bad actors in the business, she allows, but there was also misunderstanding.
“Our business had morphed a lot over the years to where almost everything we were doing was urban, salvaged, or reclaimed,” she explains. “And by the late 1990s I was reading that we’re literally helping the environment. Wood is in fact the most natural resource. It’s amazing. It’s not just sustainable, it’s also regenerative. And the wood that we were using in particular, we weren’t harvesting it for its timber value. We were using wood that would have gone into the waste stream, that would have emitted carbon.”
As a land of fruits and nuts, California also offers another distinctive possibility: salvaging of orchard trees. Traditionally, Jennifer notes, when nut and fruit trees are no longer producing as well as they once did, they are pulled out, chipped, piled, and burned. Today, Jim Evans and his team of sawyers (among others) are happy to come in and repurpose those trees.
USRW is born and things start to grow faster
Although a lot about urban wood is local and modest in size, thinking small is not strictly Jennifer’s nature. She began thinking about how wood repurposing could make real impact and realized that their family firm could scarcely have a meaningful effect by itself. “So, I thought, let me see what I can do about rallying everybody I can – all the arborists, all the tree services, the municipalities, bringing them together and then trying to find markets for this urban wood,” Jennifer recalls.
About that time, as informal industry collaboration was coming together, Jennifer learned that the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (known for short as CAL FIRE) had been tasked with addressing the problem of solid wood waste going into the waste stream. She recalls that John Melvin at CAL FIRE (today Assistant Deputy Director at that agency) encouraged her and others to set up a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with which CAL FIRE could cooperate.
Thus, the tax-exempt Urban Salvaged and Reclaimed Woods Inc. was established in 2016, with Jennifer as President, joined on the board by several more devoted urban wood professionals. As described on its annual Internal Revenue Service filing, USRW is: “A coalition of likeminded companies, individuals, or government agencies who have networked together for the purpose of tree rescue and finding the highest value of the tree after its natural life has come to an end. Finding new life for old trees.”
Although California-based, Jennifer says USRW was taking members from all over the West.
Meanwhile, out East and in the Midwest the emerald ash borer was causing people also to contemplate what to do with lots of dead and dying trees. Albeit for a different reason, an urban wood movement was coming together there and the Urban Wood Network was developed in 2017. Jennifer and others in the West began communicating, exchanging ideas, and looking for ways to join forces.
In 2019, USRW and the Urban Wood Network merged their memberships. The USRW has continued as an organization creating certification standards. Members of the Urban Wood Network are eligible to certify under those standards.
Standards add value
One of the “missing links” for making urban wood together with urban forestry generally function better has been a need to monetize the tree cycle in appropriate ways, Jennifer says, and one of the ways to do that is by improving urban wood markets. Fundamental to that effort, she believes, has been to establish the USRW Certified Wood Standards (https://www.usrwcertified.com/standards). The Standards are now in the final stages of a nationwide pilot to ensure that they work for all businesses regardless of geography or size. (Putting a value on living trees’ carbon credits might be another possibility for monetizing urban trees, she adds, but that is so far still an idea in its infancy.)
Utilizing the USRW standards, members of the Uban Wood Network are able to certify the sourcing, processing, quality, and labeling of their urban wood. The new standards draw inspiration from certifications long used in conventional forestry, such as those of the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).
USRW Certified Wood standards are joining the ranks of the existing standards from conventional forestry.
Jennifer reports from her own conversations with wood retailers and wholesalers that there is strong interest in urban wood, but also cautious attitudes. They are asking reasonable questions: What was the drying process for this lot of wood? Could it be transferring pests from one place to another? Is it going to be stable? If the seller calls it urban wood, is it really urban wood? Where was it sourced?
By its very nature, Jennifer explains, the urban wood sphere includes a lot of smaller producers. They are acquiring trees here and there across their communities, not drawing upon thousands of acres waiting to be harvested. They need cost-effective certification and inventory management systems that can work in their own situations while enabling their businesses to operate at a more commercial scale.
As a complement to the USRW standards, Jennifer has founded AncesTREE®, an app-based digital toolbox for tracking and managing specialty woods inventory from tree stump to online marketplace and beyond. Initially developed for the family business, AncesTREE® is now available to small producers in free or paid versions. The app can be used to record the story and history of wood from a specific source, enabling that narrative to accompany the wood all the way through the milling and drying process and to the final consumer. Soon, AncesTREE® will link in also to an online wood marketplace.
Tagged for tracking. With its own QR code, this log’s origin and story will follow it to and through the sawmill. The wood products cut from this log (originating from an urban community in Eugene, Oregon) also will be identified using AncesTREE® so that end customers will know where it came from and that it was processed according to USRW Certified Wood standards.
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