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There are architects, builders, and end-customers today who care about the origins of wood used in their projects. No reputable builder wants to use material sold as “urban wood” only later to discover it originated from an Amazon rain forest cleared to grow soybeans.
Jennifer Alger, an energetic organizer and promoter in developing the business of rescuing and marketing urban, salvaged, and reclaimed wood, sees opportunity to strengthen the movement through product certification, tracking wood products’ origins and chains of custody, and facilitating online markets in these products.
Jennifer’s family-owned Far West Forest Products is a California-based member of the Urban Wood Network and proponent of USRW Certified Urban Woods. Following on to our recent BlueGreen Minute introducing urban wood and which admittedly had a Midwestern U.S. perspective (“Urban lumber prolongs trees’ value to the community”), we spoke to Jennifer about the origins of the urban wood movement in the West, how it joined up with similarly minded folks in the Midwest and East, and prospects for cooperation and technology to make the whole effort work better.
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Jim Evans, founder of Far West Forest Products and Jennifer’s father, was involved with urban wood years before anybody had thought to give it a name. As a girl, Jennifer had watched him repurpose urban trees not necessarily out of altruistic motivation but because that’s how he fed his family during winter.
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The business has changed considerably since then. Contributing to the transformation are public concerns about overstuffed landfills, a change in milling technology, new attitudes, and, somewhat indirectly, the emerald ash borer crisis out east.
To this day, ash borer has not come to California. The main impetus to do something more sensible with urban trees needing to be cut was a law mandating that communities reduce landfilling of waste wood.
“At that time in California our landfills already were maxing out,” Jennifer relates, “and you know that meant they also were emitting carbon... Well, it turns out that a lot of what was going into landfills was saw logs… Companies like ours were already happily milling that wood. We just weren’t calling it urban.”
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“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.”
