72 – Cambium Carbon

Saving the Planet One Urban Log at a time

Cambium Carbon is a Washington DC based company that is into Urban Lumber.  That's the understatement of the year because they have the potential to change the face of the lumber industry by creating a circular industry.  Put a different way they are repurposing an existing waste stream into viable lumber.  

Each year something like 36 million trees are felled in cities.  These logs go into landfills or are ground into mulch or maybe turned into firewood.  Certainly  mulch and firewood need to happen: they are viable industries.  But lumber quality logs are going to waste.

Cambium Carbon seeks to be the matchmaker here.  They source these urban logs and get them to local sawmills to be turned into boards.  Those mills then get them to people who make them into beautiful things.  Cambium Carbon they reinvests their profits back into replanting trees in the urban environment where the trees came from.  It is a circular economy that not only has proven to be sustainable but a net positive due to the creation of a demand where there previously was none.

But the replanting efforts are not the standard corporate speak of planting trees for the planet.  These are not just random seedlings thrown into a pulp plantation.  Cambium Carbon partners with local organizations to assess the urban canopy and replant for the betterment of that ecosystem.  They use the same diligence and care that a silviculturalist would use in the management of a timber concession.

So in essence this isn't a new idea.  It's the same timber management schema we see around the world.  But we are employing it in an urban setting where the silvicultural pressures and triggers are entirely different.  The bottom line to all of this is local, native timbers.  Hyper local sourcing to hyper local sawing.  More of the goodness that our native trees offer, creating a demand for previously uncommercialized species.  But building the demand right from the ground up with a strong emphasis in long term sustainability.