All trees have a life cycle, so Street Tree Revival are making every effort to save the trees we can from ending up in landfills. When city trees need to be removed, we preserve their natural beauty and also limit carbon emissions by salvaging trees lost during storms, disease, or normal senescence and recycling this wood into useable raw lumber.
Our urban wood offers a story unlike any other as they have been salvaged from our city streets… a true Street Tree Revival.
Why urban wood? We have these beautiful heritage trees that provide a ton of resources and can give a new life if we allow ourselves to build something new out of them. We also once had this hundreds of years old tree that we got to witness scientists cut through and examine it, estimating it as one of the oldest in the known universe. They found bullets inside it, which was crazy. Abraham Lincoln could have stood under it. If you put it in a chipper and let it mulch up, that’s not honoring its whole story.
Another reason to use urban wood is because California is blessed with a diverse array of species of trees. San Diego has over 900 species of trees for example. The West Coast is typically a soft wood market, but there are so many exotic trees like eucalyptus globulus from Australia, Tasmanian blackwood from Tasmania, carob from Southeast Asia, eucalyptus camaldulensis, and the ficus from India. Who knew North Indian rosewood would be growing on the streets of California, Arizona, and Nevada? It is kind of invasive but look at the beautiful wood that has been going in the trash all these years.
Did you know?
From one log alone, you can get 3,500 board feet, which could be enough to floor an entire house. There are so many resources that aren’t being tapped into or not being tapped into well enough. People need to realize that what they have in their front yard is valuable beyond when it’s still standing.
124 million tons of CO2e could be sequestered nationally from urban hardwood over the next 30 years. “Could be” is key. We currently don’t have the best management practices to harvest that wood and turn it into useable lumber; it’s more beneficial for cities and contractors not to use the wood. Urban trees in the U.S. hold about 774 million tons of carbon. Look how much is stored in our urban forest right now. The more trees we plant, the bigger the waste stream will eventually be. This means we need to think about what happens to trees in their next stage of life.
50% of above-ground is suitable for solid hardwood products. We’re currently making benches from logs that can only be 20 inches wide, so we’re not just talking about the big ones. Small ones work, too.
Better Value!
Also, urban lumber is valued greater than forest grade because of history, unusual figure, and personal meaning. Just like how Abraham Lincoln stood under this oak tree. When we chop a tree like that down, you can turn it into something else like a table or a mantelpiece to keep the tree alive for even longer.
A board foot is a 12-inch by 12-inch by 1-inch piece of lumber. For each board foot of wood, there is 4.7 pounds of carbon. We have at least 8,000 board feet in our showroom, which equates to over 37,000 pounds of CO2 stored! Each kiln load is 3,000-4,000 board feet, which is 14,000-18,000 pounds of stored carbon. By turning this wood into lumber, it keeps the carbon from going back into the atmosphere.
STR is located all over the state, collecting trees from Northern California and milling them up there and drying them down here in Southern California or vice versa. We also do work in Arizona and Nevada, just like WCA. It takes a team to get this profound amount of wood (300 tons of green waste a day) through our systems.
