By Katherine Salant
Saturday, July 15, 2006; F05

Imagine: "The flooring was made from trees we cut down before we built our house," the homeowner proudly tells her guests. "Top that for cachet!" she adds to herself.

Our catty homeowner is correct. Flooring made from the trees on your building site or from trees that your city had to remove is unusual.

But not because such wood is rare.

To the contrary, the number of hardwood trees cut every year by municipalities and private homeowners is huge. If the logs were sawn into boards instead of being mulched or tossed into a landfill, the volume, in board feet, would be equal to about two-thirds the amount of hardwood lumber produced annually in the United States, according to Stephen Bratkovich, a forest products specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service in St. Paul, Minn.

I set out to find out why such a vast wood source has not been tapped. After interviews with forest product specialists, urban foresters, urban timber experts, owners of private tree services, commercial timber sawmill owners, palett makers, recyclers, municipal administrators and sawyers (people who saw logs into boards), the answer was clear, if disheartening.

Urban timber cannot be supplied in the quantities and quality demanded by the high-volume, low-margin, commercial hardwood industry.

To the average suburbanite, all trees look attractive, but a commercial logger sees things differently. A job that entails only three or four trees -- a large number for a private homeowner or municipality -- will not interest him. To justify the expense of bringing in a crew and large tree-cutting equipment, a commercial logger wants at least 50 trees. And he wants to take out the 50 trees in one day, not spend an entire day on one tree because of the time-consuming logistics that confront an urban tree service crew. The crew must avoid hitting power lines while staying clear of houses, gardens and driveways -- a 500-pound section of a tree hitting an asphalt driveway on a hot summer day will leave a big dent.

To avoid these hazards, an urban tree service crew may have to bring down the tree in small chunks. This makes the job even less attractive to the commercial logger. He wants to bring down each tree with its trunk intact because it will be worth more. But even when urban trees can be taken down without cutting up their trunks, a commercial logger will still shun them because they often have large crowns (the part of the tree that includes the branches and leaves) and shorter, squatter trunks that are full of knots.

In a commercially managed forest, the trees are closer together, and they have to compete for sunlight. Their branches go up, not out, and their trunks are long and straight. As a consequence, a commercially harvested hardwood tree yields, on average, about twice as much millable wood as an urban hardwood tree, Bratkovich said.

And then there's the "hardware" issue -- all the nails, sections of metal fencing and even horseshoes that are commonly found in urban timber. To a commercial sawmill owner, these are an expensive headache. They can damage the blades of the large sawing equipment used in commercial sawmills; everything stops while the blades are replaced.

Clinton, Mich., palett maker Bob Moore's experience is typical. He recently tried using urban timber in his factory because palett-grade commercial lumber has been in short supply. The hardware in the wood caused work stoppages as often as three times a day, costing him several thousand dollars in repairs and labor costs while the plant was idle and cutting his daily output by two-thirds.

Finally, there's a quality issue. When timber logs are milled into boards, the boards are graded according to their visual characteristics. The two top grades, which are clear of visual defects such as knot holes, command a premium. The lower two "utility" grades, which have "character" marks such as knot holes, small holes and mineral streaks, are worth less. Urban timber is largely utility grade, and this makes it less attractive to commercial loggers.

When urban lumber is marketed to small, localized markets, however, it's a different story. For the right audience, the provenance of particular trees -- their origin and history -- conveys a value. When the wood is from people's property or the town where they live, the finished product will be treasured no matter the character of the wood, said Sam Sherrill, an urban planner at the University of Cincinnati. Sherrill offers himself as a case in point. For the past eight years he has been making furniture pieces from a 500-year-old, 11-foot-diameter burr oak that no commercial mill would touch for members of an extended family that for more than 150 years has owned the land where the tree stood.

Sherrill said a custom furniture or cabinet maker who buys wood in small quantities might also want some species of urban timber, but not until the wood has been processed -- milled into rough-sawn boards, kiln dried and milled a second time into a smooth, workable board that a craftsman can use.

When a tree is just a log on the ground, the wood has no value, and a tree service's charges include the cost of hauling it away. Many homeowners think the opposite should be true -- the person hauling the wood should pay them. In fact, Sherrill said, the value of a tree in someone's yard has nothing to do with wood. The value derives from the amenities the tree provides, such as enhancing the look of the house and providing shade in summer. Once a tree hits the ground, its value plummets to zero, but it can be recycled and given to a person or organization that can use it.

The U.S. Forest Service has been working with municipalities around the country to help them set up local programs to do just that -- recycle felled hardwood trees into useable lumber and other products.

Southeast Michigan has presented an unusual opportunity. The state has quarantined all ash trees in 21 counties to prevent the spread of the emerald ash boar, an invasive beetle from Asia that kills ash trees but does not destroy the wood. Within the 21 counties, most municipalities are removing thousands of ash trees from public land and encouraging homeowners to do the same.

To recycle as much of these trees as possible, the Southeast Michigan Resource Conservation and Development Council, funded by the Forestry Service, has been working with local tree services to keep the trunks intact when trees are taken down. This group has also provided grants to some of the tree services to purchase small sawmills and kilns to turn the ash logs into marketable hardwood lumber. The ash that cannot be milled is ground into mulch and used for landscaping or as fuel at an electric-generating facility in Flint, Mich., which is jointly operated by CMS Energy and Primary Power International and serves 25,000 households.

The city of Ann Arbor's recycle center has turned some of this ash into hardwood flooring for its demonstration Environmental House. From this experience, staff member Jason Bing has determined that the flooring can be made and sold to the public at a price that is competitive with commercially made ash flooring. As more of the ash flooring becomes available, Bing hopes that local home builders and remodelers will start to offer it to their clients.

For a land developer, recycling the trees on his building sites would seem to be a golden marketing opportunity. Turning them into entry flooring or something else for each house would be a hit with buyers. And in doing this, the developer could also garner lots of free publicity.

Katherine Salant can be contacted via her Web site,http://www.katherinesalant.com.

2006Katherine Salant Distributed by Inman News Features