In the urban forest, a felled tree used to be a dead tree. Too commonly, city and suburban trees leveled by wind, insect plagues like the emerald ash borer, and other bad breaks are headed for the wood chipper or hauled off to factories to be ground into mulch, particle board material, and end products bearing little resemblance to their leafy forebears.
Now, take the locavore mindset of consuming products within their communities of origin – a movement which started with food – and apply it to trees.
"This idea of reclaiming those kinds of trees is really picking up steam across the country. It first really got its start a couple decades ago in California. There were some small businesses that were working together with communities that were doing it, and the U.S. Forest Service has been doing a lot over the last two decades to promote this across the country...Southeast Michigan has really become a showplace for it now," says Jessica Simons, a natural resources specialist with the Southeast Michigan Resource Conservation & Development Council.
To wit: the rise of the
Urbanwood Project, a partnership between the
Southeast Michigan Resource Conservation & Development Council,
Recycle Ann Arbor, the
Genesee Conservation District, the
Genesee County Habitat for Humanity ReStore, and local small businesses that is tasked with the recycling of Southeast Michigan's fallen urban trees for lumber, flooring, millwork and cabinetry, counter and tabletop slabs, and other household uses.
Concentrate's Tanya Muzumdar discusses the resurrection of wood with Jessica Simons.
What is Urbanwood about and what was behind its inception?
We [the Council] started working on some projects together with the U.S. Forest Service and with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources back in 2004, and at that point, the area was right in the middle of the huge emerald ash borer outbreak...And so we were trying to figure out how much wood was going to be coming out of communities because of emerald ash borer, where it was going to go, if there were already businesses that could handle it...One of the things that we found pretty quickly, there were far more sawmills in the area than we realized. Except they were very small, they were typically family-owned, they didn't really advertise much...Most of them were milling trees from communities anyway...They were kind of ideally suited for the ash borer crisis. They were nimble, they could work directly with communities, so we were trying to figure out what we could do to boost the profile of these sawmills in the area, and at the same time help create more of a market for the products that they produced...
Recycle Ann Arbor was refinishing their conference room at the time...and they wanted to put new flooring in, and they always tried to highlight sustainable materials...Then the Reuse Center customers started asking about it, so Recycle Ann Arbor said that they would put up a small shelf with a little bit of the wood on it to see if reuse customers were interested. Fast forward about seven years, and now...1,600 square feet of the Reuse Center at Recycle Ann Arbor is now the Urbanwood Marketplace and has wood from six different vendors.
The first Marketplace opened at Recycle Ann Arbor's ReUse Center in 2005, followed by the Genesee County Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Flint last spring. How are the marketplaces doing since they were opened?
They're projecting right now to sell over $100,000 worth of lumber there this year. And so we think that that's great success. A couple of the mills that we worked with have credited us with keeping them in business during the slow economy...
What we're excited about the products that Urbanwood carries is that there's a tremendous variety and it's very different from what you'd see at your typical lumberyard. It's not just filled with standard dimensional lumber for a few species, like what you would see going to look at the 2X4s at Lowes. At any time there could be 25-30 different species of lumber at the Marketplace...What it represents is the species of trees that come out of the urban areas in southeast Michigan. If walnut comes out, great, walnut's always in high demand... If a mulberry tree or an osage orange comes out of a community, well, that's what gets milled too. The unpredictability of the supply and the variety of the supply is what makes Urbanwood different...Sometimes the wood has much more character than what you'd find at your traditional store. We do still carry the clear things without any kind of knots...but we also carry material that has huge knotholes, or that has staining, or that has bark still attached on the edge.
What is the cost range per board-foot?
It is all over the board.
No pun intended.
(Laughs.) We have everything from – one of the local mills sells boxes of cutoff pieces – small scrap pieces for someone who likes to carve small wooden pieces of art. You can get a large box of cutoff pieces for $15 or you can buy a tabletop slab that is $1,500...The range is enormous. It's possible to walk out with a board for a couple of bucks, but if you're looking for something high-end, spectacular, you can get that too.
With what happened with the emerald ash borer, with the fact that people in SEMI, in that urban area, are looking at forestry problems and realizing that they live in an urban forest and realizing they have to care for an urban forest, it has also made them more receptive to hearing about what can be done with the products of that urban forest.
Are other communities following your lead?
This whole cooperative structure that we've developed is really something that is increasingly going to be looked at as a model for other regions. We've been in a lot of contact with the folks who are trying to promote the same thing in different other metropolitan areas around the country. There are some people in the Chicago area who are doing it, there are people in Madison, Wisconsin, and in Milwaukee who are trying to do it, there are people in North Carolina, people in California. There are pockets all around the country where you see these initiatives taking place. As far as I know, the cooperative we have, the combined marketplaces that we have with a whole group of small sellers, that's the only one we know of selling urban material like this that we know of in the country. And so we're getting a lot of calls from other areas where urban wood use is taking off...We're hoping to see more of this happen...I think it was one of those cases where out of disaster, something good bloomed. With just the volume of waste that was created by emerald ash borer and the awareness that it created, I think it actually gave us the perfect environment for something like this to grow.
The Traverwood branch of the Ann Arbor Public Library has a lot of reclaimed ash flooring and shelving in its interior.
Yes, we worked on the
Traverwood branch... Part of the harvesting and milling of the ash trees that went into that building, that was paid for through a grant that our council got from the U.S. Forest Service.
What's another significant project using recycled wood?
Paul Hickman is a local designer in Ann Arbor...He is working using our partners as suppliers, and he's producing a whole line of picture frames made from urban wood. His business is called Urban Ashes and he uses the wood and works with people from the local workforce development group and actually is doing job training and development with people who are coming out of corrections, people who are in transitional labor for one reason or another, who are producing these high-end picture frames...He's using Michigan glass in the picture frames, he's using Michigan paper for the backing. It's an entirely Michigan product and he's getting great reception from boutique gift stores throughout Michigan and also even throughout the country.
And what's next for Urbanwood?
"In the bigger picture, we would really just love to see more markets develop. We are very open to the idea of creating a couple more marketplaces throughout southeast Michigan and just getting more people aware that this wood is available, that this can happen with their own trees, that we can see more communities buy into the concept as well...We would love to see every city that has a plan for managing their urban forest to include a plan for how they manage the wood when the trees come down."
Tanya Muzumdar is a freelance writer, poet, and the Assistant Editor of Concentrate and Metromode. Her last feature column was "German Park is Heimplatz for Summer Festivities".
All photos by Doug Coombe