Our Impact
Urban Wood Economy’s enterprise-driven model is capturing carbon, creating jobs, and stopping the cycle of waste before it begins. We see urban and community wood as the valuable commodity it is, and leverage it to create restorative systems with multi-level benefits to the economy, environment, and communities most in need of sustainable occupations and resources.
“When discarded wood comes into our supply chains, everything that comes out—lumber, biochar or compost—has monetary value. There’s zero waste and tremendous revenue opportunity.”
Jeff Carroll | Co-Founder, Urban Wood Economy
Social, Environmental and Economic Results
We create long-term solutions to large-scale problems:
For each million board feet of lumber reclaimed from waste wood, 6.2 million pounds of CO2 greenhouse gas is kept out of the atmosphere.
From furniture to flooring to guitars, urban milled timber is contributing to the transformation of some of the 36 million community trees that are lost each year—more than all the trees harvested in U.S. National Forests—into durable products.
Our “whole tree” philosophy ensures waste reduction by using all parts of downed trees — leaf to root — through innovative technologies that convert that wood back into resources ranging from biochar to mulch to energy production.
We’re transforming demolition into deconstruction, where salvageable wood is reclaimed instead of disposed of. This is not a new way of thinking, but doing it at scale in an urban setting is.
We’re striving to create hundreds of direct and thousands of indirect sustainable job opportunities across the country, complete with workplace training and life skills development, to foster growth in deconstruction and urban and community wood recovery.
Reinvestment in tree planting and maintenance improves health and equity outcomes for communities, especially those in marginalized neighborhoods. We see this part of the regenerative cycle as important as any other link in the cycle.