Waste comes in many forms. When it comes to felled timber and lumber products especially, any and all waste is a serious problem. In past pieces for GBA, I have written about the need for larger industry players to better synergize their operations. “The waste industry is not connected to the lumber industry,” Eric Law, cofounder of Urban Machine, told me in 2023. Recent EPA data support this outlook: a frighteningly high percentage—about 70%—of wood from construction and demolition debris is directed to landfills. But then, construction and demolition debris aren’t the only categories of wood waste.

Tangential waste categories include trees that have been felled due to disease, clear-cutting after natural disasters, and natural (methane-producing) decay in neglected forest areas, all in addition to the mountains of discarded offcuts from construction sites. Cambium, a Baltimore-based supply-chain technology company that repurposes wood waste from freshly cut sources, calls these categories the four D’s: disease, decay, disaster, and development. The company’s founder, Ben Christensen, calls his platform a means for “connecting a really fragmented supply chain.” Those fragments include logging companies, truckers, sawmills, lumber retailers, furniture manufacturers, architects, and a handful of other players who all deal in wood and who all contribute, in one form or another, to wonted disposal of product that could otherwise be put to good use.

Aggregating wood waste

“There’s a lot of wasted material and there are a lot of businesses that are trying to use it,” Christensen says. “Where they struggle is connecting into large-scale offtake [contracts].” Cambium then steps in as an aggregator of supply-chain logistics, facilitating offtakes between businesses and diverting a lot of wood from landfills in the process.

Such offtakes including connecting tree-care services to truckers, truckers to sawmills, sawmills to manufacturers, manufacturers to retailers, and so on. The biggest logistical hurdle within each step in the value chain is identifying the largest sources of wood waste and getting to it before it’s disposed of. That challenge is a never-ending one, for sure, but thankfully one that more landowners, arborists, millers, builders, manufacturers, and designers are becoming cognizant of. To date, Cambium has facilitated the delivery of tens of millions of board feet worth of salvaged product to sawmills. Buyers of upcycled, furniture-grade product include Gensler, Room & Board, Steelcase, Patagonia, and National Geographic.

Christensen also highlights the “massive, massive volumes” of wood that, if properly upcycled instead of being sent to the chipper or incinerator, could have transformative effects for the U.S. lumber industry. “About 36 million trees come down in and around U.S. cities every year to the tune of about 46 million tons. When you add surrounding peri-urban areas plus wood waste from [poorly managed] forests in the American West, you get close to half of U.S. annual wood demand.”

When considering the root cause of this overwhelming waste, Christensen highlights how cities and surrounding woodlands are being mismanaged. “Tree are being managed, they’re just not being managed for logging or any sort of sort of forestry. They’re being managed for parks and utilities; all that wood is seen as waste.” This fact is evident for anyone who has driven past a row of utility vehicles parked on the side of the road, just a day or two after a big storm, and witnessed workers feeding felled trees into a mobile woodchipper.

Christensen insists that his operation and others like it will not “totally displace” traditional forestry and bigger supply chains that traverse long distances, and often international borders, but it can have “meaningful impact” nonetheless. The species being used in its efforts include poplar, southern yellow pine, and Douglas fir, but other species will not be turned away, especially if there is a seller and buyer to be connected.

A new repurposed wood product

Last month, Cambium officially unveiled Carbon Smart Wood, which can be used in many applications and which the company bills as the “first-ever salvaged wood for a mass timber product.” The cross-laminated timber (CLT) product is being produced in partnership with manufacturers like Mercer Mass Timber, SmartLam, Sterling Structural, and Vaagen Timbers. (Of note, Cambium’s director of mass timber operations, Charles Gale, previously served as a business analyst with SmartLam.) Spreading the wealth not only ensures higher volumes of product being made, but it also creates a wider distribution network throughout the country, creating localized supply chains in nearly every U.S. region.

“We are super locally focused,” Christensen says. “We want to move material much shorter distances over its lifespan, and that’s a big part of how we get unit economic gains and efficiencies and carbon benefits.” Through dual efforts of diversion and sequestration, Cambium’s repurposed CLT product—made entirely from waste streams—becomes a “net carbon sink.” Consequently, the purchase and use of Carbon Smart Wood has already helped several large companies reach emission reduction benchmarks en route to becoming net-zero operations.

An upcoming exhibit at the Mass Timber Conference in Portland titled the “Carbon Smart Campfire” will promote the viability and “innovative potential” of Texas wood products made from Carbon Smart Wood. By the company’s estimates, to date Cambium has facilitated the production of 8 million board feet of Carbon Smart Wood from waste streams, roughly the equivalent of sequestering 10,000 tons of CO2e.

New intelligence tools

Cambium’s business plan is distinct, laudable, and quite possibly ambitious to a fault. The cumbersome nature of building a national network and regional subnetworks of hundreds of movers, makers, sellers, and customers—all tantamount to reinventing supply chains from scratch to save a few thousand tons of carbon—is enough to make anyone dizzy. This isn’t lost on Christensen.

In another effort to meet the moment, as it were, Cambium is investing millions in AI tech to gain a more nuanced understanding of how businesses operate and how connections between parties within the value chain can be better facilitated. The company announced just days ago that it has raised $18.5 million in venture capital to invest in an AI platform that “can help pen-and-paper businesses …digitize their books” without altering their core practices.

In keeping with its core mission to “aggregate a lot of different initiatives,” the potential for AI to aggregate disparate pieces of information and deliver it in the right way to different players has game-changing implications. In other words, a lot of waste can be avoided on top of what already has been diverted from landfills. According to Christensen, “We take very seriously the job of just making sh*t easy.”

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Justin R. Wolf is a Maine-based writer who covers green building trends and energy policy. He is the author of Healing Ground, Living Values: Stanley Center for Peace and Security, published by Ecotone.