How Urban Wood is Helping Cities Fight Climate Change

Hello and welcome to the Conscious Design Podcast. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and I help turn product ideas into sustainable 7-figure businesses. Join me for another episode where sustainability meets innovation and business savvy. Today, we're excited to have Paul Hickman. He's the founder and CEO of Urban Ashes, where they're leading in urban wood recycling and systems. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Good to be here. Yeah.

Well, everybody loves, loves a good origin story. So let's step back a little bit. What got you to decide to take on this pretty large problem of wasted tree wood resource in urban settings?

It would have to go back to mid-'90s or so, living in Chicago. And at the time, I had already spent roughly 15-plus years in the scenic arts industry as a designer and manufacturer of what we used to call dimensional signage, but now is more commonly referred to as environmental graphics. So, I was doing a lot of work in restaurant retail spaces all over the country and was getting a little bit tired of what materials I was using, more specifically how it was potentially impacting myself. I was feeling pretty beat up. Physically at the end of the day when I'm, you know, in my early late 30s and it's like I need to come up with other ways of doing some things. You know, I was a graphics director and ran a sign company, but also on the side since college, I had been doing custom furniture, studio furniture, one-of-a-kind furniture for commissions as well as for gallery pieces. And so I started initially started looking for alternative materials for those pieces. And again, this is very early internet, '94, '95-ish, and discovered around that time that there was this whole green building movement going on predominantly in the San Francisco Bay Area, but also further up the coast in Seattle and some in Portland. And so ultimately in '98, gave up my career as a graphic designer, artist, production manager in that realm and decided to actually initially go back to school to get my master's in architecture out in the San Francisco Bay Area. But once I moved out there, I took a job as a forklift driver at a company called Ecotimber. Ecotimber even predates FSC certification. They were one of the very first pioneering lumber yards that really showcased the viability of sustainable lumber. Both— they started out mainly as hardwoods and then introduced softwoods as well. They originated out of San Francisco and then moved into Berkeley area, which is when I started working for them. And I ended up becoming their retail sales manager. And between that and the volume of design work that I was doing, that sort of people found out kind of my design background, and I was very interested in new materials and more sustainable materials and things like that. I started picking up a lot of work doing furniture, a lot more furniture than I was doing before. So I shifted out of going back to school because I had as much work as I wanted or needed. And I think I lasted 2 weeks in school then because I had so much work so quickly.

Great.

Yeah, which was a good situation, but got really connected because that was such a hotbed at the time for some of the serious pioneers in green design, sustainability, whatever term we want to use. When I left Chicago, I was showing at CDS, the Chicago Design Show, and there was, I got a little article written up. Very large show that's now been consumed by NeoCon, I think, which you're probably aware of NeoCon and maybe know of CDS, but it's been gone for a while. And we're showing furniture in there and I got a write-up in the Tribune, the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times about this guy doing green furniture, little tiny, maybe 2-sentence article. Your blurb would be more accurate.

It counts.

You know, doing this novel green design and really the only one in the entire show. And I remember going back to the show maybe 5 years later and there's an entire pavilion on it. And obviously now there's countless shows dedicated just to green and sustainable design. But being in the Bay Area and getting connected with Eco Timber, and they were very involved in getting FSC established, and really that was my crash course in sustainable wood utilization, community-based forestry programs all over the world, but also purchasing urban wood. Which I knew nothing about prior to. I knew about deconstructed wood, but at that time urban wood referred to street trees, yard trees, storm-damaged trees, things like that, trees that were coming down. And at the time, mainly we were focused on municipalities in the Bay Area, trees that were coming down there that would typically end up in the chipper or burn pile or the landfill. And so we were capturing that, working with some small mills, and we were retailing it through our lumberyard there. And that was my introduction initially to Urban wood, so to probably want to define urban wood now. The definition, or at least my sort of simplified definition, is any wood that came from any tree that came down for any reason other than its wood value. So it can be storm damage, it can be blight stricken, it can be even new construction that's on the lower level. But you know, we always want to keep the trees up and alive as long as possible. But when they do come down for whatever reason other than harvesting them for the wood value, obviously we want to divert them from the chipper. And those other lower-level waste streams or lower-level uses. Chipping and mulch is still great and we need it, but we have so much of it, way more than we'll ever utilize. A high percentage of it never gets used. And unfortunately, a lot of it ends up in the landfill. How did we get there? I only got halfway there. So, that introduced me to Urban Wood. And, in 2001 or 2000, my oldest son was born and I really didn't want to And Ecotimber had just been purchased and I did not stay with them. And so I was doing my own design work at that point strictly. And when my oldest son was born, I just didn't want to raise kids in the East Bay. I grew up in the Midwest and sounded like Midwest was a better place to raise kids. At least that's what it felt to me at the time. I love the Bay Area, but it is very expensive and there's just a lot of people. And so moved to Ann Arbor to be closer to family. And it put us— little did I know, fast forward to 2002. That the emerald ash borer was identified here in Southeast Michigan. It had really probably been here for several years already. For those who don't know what that is, it's a small invasive beetle that is native to Asia that came in through the ports. They're pretty confident through the ports of Detroit and Cleveland, and to date has killed hundreds of millions of ash trees across the country. And so multiple folks around are looking at me saying, you're the only one we know that has any knowledge about— so that would definitely qualify as urban wood when that tree It has to come down. And so we put together a network of mills to try to utilize that ash to its highest and best degree beyond chipping it network and making it available for other species of woods also. So it's not just limited for ash, but because of the volume of ash was coming down, that was really the impetus behind. And we launched the first urban wood project here in Southeast Michigan, like 2003 to 2005. And it's now grown really into a national industry, there definitely were pockets of urban wood utilization all over the country. This is stuff we, 100 years ago, that was the standard practice. We used everything that came down. We didn't waste anything. We weren't shipping trees from the other side of the country, let alone the other side of the world. We were using what was literally in our yard or at least in our community. And then with the introduction of transportation and stuff, it just, that changed. But, there's a lot of places around the country that continued but not very much. The standard practice became to chip a lot of the local stuff and we just made a shift of the methodology or the way we were doing things.

And, is it mostly just a process and ease of, hey, just buy it from the mill that's already brought it to you? Or, is there a value like when you plant trees in a neighborhood or a park or something like that, You're clearly not picking it based on the best construction wood. Is there—

Not anyways.

Okay.

I argue that if all things considered, if you're going to plant trees and you obviously look at trees, what's the best type of tree for this location and what kind of shade do we want? Where is it going to be? All of those things. How's it going to do with drought tolerance for whatever the area you're at? And then all things considered equally, to me, the last thing you should look at is what's the quality of the wood going to be at the end.

And that seems like an easy, logical thing to think. Yeah.

You know, it's not, and I use this as an extreme example, but, you know, and I don't know that you would ever, I'm waiting for somebody to say, yeah, we came down to white oak and cottonwood are the 2 ideal trees. Which one should we plant? I don't think that's ever going to happen, but you definitely want to plant the white oak if you're after the wood, the quality of the wood, that kind of thing. But there are all kinds of others out there that are— a big part of it is we've gotten away from— we're very much— wood in particular is very design-driven. You being in the— coming out of the design industry or being in the design industry, various species are what's popular. What are the designers and architects specifying and what do they like? What's the current trend? You know, in the '80s, red oak was the rage for several decades, and then cherry took over, and cherry finally waned about 5 years ago or so, and walnut and maple have kind of resurged. So, it's very design-driven, and we don't realize that there's all of these other species out there that are equally aesthetically pleasing or even nicer. We outperform some of those. We just get very caught up in our Sort of, you know, what's the easiest way? You know, we know this works, we know where we can get it, those kinds of things. Urban Wood, I think what you were alluding to a little bit before is it's a challenge with Urban Wood is the supply chain is, can be chaotic and it can be inconsistent. And that's exactly why Urban Ashes is doing what Urban Ashes is doing. Our goal is to simplify that supply chain and make it as easy as possible for both Whoever the caretaker or the landowners are that, you know, have the trees and the mills and the manufacturers and the specifiers, the designers, make it as easy as possible for them to access this and that they understand it, that it's really not that much different than specifying FSC 20 years ago or 25 years ago was a— people were afraid to specify it. They didn't know what it was. How is this different? And Urban Wood is kind of like that. It's just another step. And it's me as Urban Ash's goal is to make sure, A, we educate all the various potential stakeholders, but also make it as easy as possible for them to access the material.

And so do you work mostly, because I'm imagining a lot of these trees are really owned and maintained by municipalities, city. Is that the case or do you also have a lot of homes, neighborhoods, individual property type of tree or is it about like, how does that—

It's all of the above. So, again, back to sort of the definition of urban wood, the name is challenging name. And unfortunately, the industry, the urban wood industry struggles with it. And, it's always a topic of conversation in a lot of meetings because it sounds like it's all coming from larger urban locations. It can come from urban, suburban, or rural. It's really, it could be orchard trees that age out that are no longer producing, you know, that an orchard will then take, or, you know, the farmer will take that out, replace them. And those will often end up in the chipper kind of thing. But there's some incredible wood there, particularly when you get into walnuts out in California and Oregon and Washington, those walnuts are spectacular wood.

You must have some cherry wood when that comes back too.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, cherry's a big one. So, it's a different kind of cherry for the American black cherry. And even the walnuts out in California is really the Claro walnut is the one we know of. Eastern black walnut is really the more dominant wood, but the nut itself is definitely edible and historically was highly consumed by Native Americans and early Europeans. It definitely takes some more processing to make it tasty, let's put it that way. And so, the California walnuts or the walnuts that most people are used to are California or Claro walnut as opposed to the Eastern black walnut. It's a different species.

They're a little different.

They're very bitter. It can be very bitter, but it's an acquired taste. And, they're very healthy also. There's some great nutrients in them, but it definitely is an acquired taste.

So, with this, if you're getting into really it's all of these locations, I would imagine that there should be a fairly consistent, if not a large— you know, it may not be a really large supply, but at least a consistent one, because these groves and orchards are always going to be this rotation of plant and grow because they will eventually die, right? So—

Absolutely.

Is that there though, or do you— like, I guess, what's the hurdle? Because I would imagine a lot of these people are have chippers. They kind of have a system down where they just, oh, cut it down, chip it up.

You just described the hurdle that this is, you know, business as usual. This is the way we've always done it. That right there, I hate to say it, is the simplest and hardest barrier to get over. How much is there? There's roughly 46 million metric tons of furniture-grade lumber that gets chipped every year instead of being utilized.

It's a lot of chairs.

Sort of. Well, I'm going to give you specifics on that. That equals, that's roughly 7 to 8 billion board feet available every year. And that's every year. So that's, as you asked, how often is it there? And people say, are you going to, are you concerned about running out of material? And my comment is the day we run out of that material, we got bigger problems because we're probably not even alive when the trees are no longer there. Dying means there's no more trees and we're probably not surviving. So we got a bigger problem. It's the trees are there and that, you know, 7 to 8 billion board feet, to give you an idea of how important this is, that's roughly 6.4. So wood itself, particularly hardwoods, is about 50% carbon by weight when it's dry. And so that 7 to 8 billion board feet equals about 6.4 million metric tons of carbon that we lose every year. from our urban forest, and that's emitting roughly 23 million metric tons of CO2 emissions just from chipping our wood and burning the wood or landfilling it. And if we just capture 40% of that, that's the equivalent of planting about 154 million trees and growing them for 10 years.

But you could do that every year.

Every year when the infrastructure is there, then yes, you can do that every year. If we captured all of the urban wood, that we're talking about, it's about 10% of what the North American hardwood or US hardwood industry produces every year. So it's not going to offset or completely eliminate the hardwood industry. It's definitely a complement to it. And what it does is that it lets some of those trees live longer and let them do what trees really do best. And there's an argument really that many would call heresy, but really the environmental value of a tree is greater or its potential is greater after it's lived its life because that wood can last indefinitely and that carbon can be continued to be sequestered indefinitely, where an urban tree may live 40 to 60 years and does all the great things that it does. And then once it comes down, if you keep that carbon continued to be sequestered, it's still providing this incredible environmental value. Not to mention you got nice tables or buildings and things like that that we need for everyday use. So the value of our trees is we undervalue them. particularly in the urban environment or the built environment would be more kind of almost more places that we live, work, and play is kind of another way to look at it. That those trees, we don't look at them the same way as we look at traditionally forested trees that we know are going to get harvested and turned into wood and things like that. We don't think about the tree in our front yard, like what happened to it when it came down? It could be producing or doing the same thing.

No, we have somebody comes by, cuts it down and takes it away.

Yeah, it's a big problem for municipalities because, so kind of back to your question, is this coming from municipalities or private owners? Our model in particular, so kind of go back to our origin story. I was still doing the design work up until 2009 when the Urban Wood Project here in Southeast Michigan had gotten large enough where we were I think we had 4 locations, 4 Urban Wood marketplaces going where we're selling lumber around basically Southeast Michigan. And myself and one of the original guys that started that got back together and said, we need to come up with a product that we can scale nationally and showcase that urban wood is scalable. And so we launched Urban Ashes at the time in 2009 to prove the viability of scale on a manufacturing level. And we started manufacturing predominantly picture frames, but then added back in furniture again, because a lot of that was sort of my background passion. But picture frames, we grew to sell to about 250 locations in 43 states over 10 years to prove that this is— we changed the picture frame industry. Nobody was doing anything at that time beyond a very small volume of kind of barn wood was out there, not urban wood. Nobody knew anything about it. So there was a lot of education on our part. But really by 2019 or so, and we shut down manufacturing and really decided to focus on how do we simplify the supply chain and make it easier again because it was still very chaotic and it was still lesser known. 20 years ago, hardly anybody knew what urban wood was. It is definitely much more on the radar now and it is, it used to be called a movement and those in the industry really push now. It's like we're, We're no longer a movement. We are a full-blown industry. And it is, you know, we've got the attention and not just the attention, but the involvement of some major manufacturers and major producers and major retailers are realizing the value of these materials, both for their environmental impact, but also the aesthetic and the story behind it. Because it's, you know, everybody, especially in the design world or products, people want theirs to stand out. And every, in the case of this, If you work with any kind of wood, all wood is always, you know, it's going to have some variation in it. Urban wood has even more variation, and you have to embrace that and enhance that. Our joke was in our shop with manufacturing, and I was looking at stuff that would typically be considered a defect and kicked out, cut out. Our comment was, no, that's character, and we're charging extra for it. It's all a mindset. It really is. You know, who defines that as a flaw and who defines it as high value. It's purely subjective. And so, just changing mindset.

This is an interesting topic of even the concept of quality, right? Is we have, and I was talking to another designer just at a conference a week or two ago, and we really value consistency. And there's this perceived value of, oh, we were talking about a product that gets, it's like a server. And they paint it. There's no actual mechanical reason to paint it. It's a galvanized steel. It's— nothing's going to happen to it. But they were at the time convinced that if they didn't paint it, no one would value it as much and they'd have to cut their prices, even though it cost them extra. They had quality issues. You have to deal with paint, right? All these things. And then they finally, over like 2 years, they finally were convinced, yeah, it's, it's a pattern. And no, you can't control what it's going to look like, but it doesn't actually make it worth less. Like, people are really buying it for the server components inside. They're not— it's going to go in a room under a desk. No one's going to see this really. Like, and so there's— I'm starting to see more of these shifts of brands are starting to embrace that not everything has to be the perfect uniform. Look, we can have these other looks. We can have materials that are changed. There's a company that all they do is they buy the leftover leather from like the Italian brands where they have like 2 hides left. They're not going to use it because they're trying to make a million units of something, but they'll, they'll take that and they go, hey, we've made 33 purses. Why? Because 33 is what we could cut out of it.

Yeah, they're rare now and you're charging extra for it. It was a cast-off.

Yep, exactly. They'll never make it again. That hide will never be be available. That material will never be there. Buy it if you like it, buy it now. If not, you know, wait for the next pattern to show up, see if the next thing that they do is interesting. So it's— I love that that's all entering this too, the wood side, because I feel like there's so much character you can have there. And to not— it needs to be highlighted and not thrown away. Exactly. There was—

when I was working at Eco Timber in the late '90s, I remember getting some, you know, spectacular boards of, oh, I think it was Granadillo. I'm not positive, but I was making some bookshelves for my brother and really just the boards. And I was going to ship them cross-country to him. And this wood and the stuff we were working with was pretty new to me and it was so unique. And I was like, yeah, he'll really like this. And so I don't know, it was like 4 boards or something. And I spent, and I had done, been doing a lot of finishing for years. And so I put on, I don't know how many coats of hand-rubbed finish and it was more intense than a piano finish. As far as a finish goes, it was pretty spectacular. But, this one guy, one of the guys working there walked by and he said, that's so perfect. It looks like plastic laminate. And, I mean, it was crushing, totally crushing. And, it was just like all the time I spent and you just called it plastic. It occurred to me he was right. And, it's like I took away all the wood uniqueness of it and didn't pay homage to that and didn't respect that. And I converted it into something that it really wasn't. And that's something I keep in my head all the time is embrace what it is and, or find something different. If you don't like it, then find, you know, go another direction. But if you want to use—

There's a million materials out there. You can find something. Yes.

And embrace it and make it what it is and really showcase it. And Showcase it in the fact that just like any one of us, we're all unique. Every person is totally unique. And that's what makes humans and any animal, anything about nature interesting. Trying to make things absolutely consistent, A, you're never going to actually do it. And trying to achieve that is— I mean, there's all the clichés about don't throw out whatever it is and going after perfection because you're not going to get it. So embrace the imperfection in it and enjoy it. And that's really my focus. My furniture in general, the stuff that I have here, I abuse the hell out of it. And I don't mean that intentionally. It's just we live with it and I don't worry about it when it gets damaged and it gets beat up. And even if there's a big ring because I set a hot kettle on this and burned into the wood by accident, that becomes a story for your grandkids. It's like, oh, I remember when grandpa did this and grandma screamed at him and whatever it was. It's the witness. A friend of mine uses that term and I love that term. It becomes a witness to what happened. And embracing that witness and enhancing it and sharing it, I think, is what's so wonderful about it. And making that as easy as possible for people. We are so caught up in convenience. What is the most convenient? And I'm more interested in slowing things down. And it's taken us 5 years to develop the systems that we have to work with these cities because even more than I thought it was going to take. Because we're working with systems that have been entrenched for decades. And to get them to change, we have to be patient with them and we have to understand and go work with them and find out where all the pinch points are. And it's not going to be a really quick solution. It's not going to— we're not going to make $1 million in a month and then we're all of a sudden a multimillion-dollar company. This is the long haul. And to be working with municipalities to make them do this shift, You know, it's taken us 5 years and we literally just signed the contract with our pilot model 2 days ago. And we're currently working with about 25 other cities across the country.

Congratulations though.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, it's, and just working with the legality and bureaucracy that are municipalities. And that's exactly why so many mills don't even want to touch municipalities. You can walk into any small urban mill around the country and ask them if they've, do you guys get trees from your local municipality? And they'll say, yeah, we tried. And it just, they'll pay somebody to destroy 'em instead of give 'em away or somehow make 'em available to the local mills because it's a change of the bureaucracy and all the paperwork and everything. And so it takes time and we have to be patient in that and get that in place. But right now I'm really well over 25 other cities that are now waiting for all those systems to be in place. And we now have 'em in place. They're always going to be evolving. And so you're going to see, it took us 5 years to get one city. It won't be another 5 years for the next city. It may be a month or 2 months kind of thing, or 6 months. And then they're going to start picking up where it becomes, and everybody's always afraid to be the first one to jump into the water, so to speak, always, whether it's investing or whatever it is.

No one wants to be first except for the few crazy people that are like, yeah, I'll be first every time. Yeah.

So early adopters. Whether it's from green design to the whole local movement has been a big part of sort of my career. And also, which we haven't talked about, is kind of another major component of Urban Ashes is working with providing careers and job opportunities and business opportunities for formerly incarcerated folks and youth that have had contact with the justice system. 20 years ago, nobody was talking about that. And now it's kind of gotten to be more talked about for sure. It is not— the needle has moved a little bit, but I would argue it again is another massively discarded resource. It's our most valuable resource. Human resource is the most valuable, and we discard those populations or we just, we don't value them. And that's a problem to me and to society. It's not— it's just a fact. It creates a massive problem. In the case of trees, We're losing all that carbon. And to give you an idea, direct air capture is like the hot way of going after climate change, is one of the biggest money investments around the world. The biggest one right now is in Iceland, and it's capable of doing about 36,000 metric tons of CO2 being pulled out of the air every year. And going back to what I said before, the urban wood industry, if you captured all of it, it's 6.5 No, excuse me, 23 million metric tons. So that's by multiple degrees of 10. And it's a whole lot easier to go after trees than Stratos down in Texas is doing. I don't know, it's like $1.3 billion is what it's costing to create this direct air capture program. And it's only going to be able to do 7% of what the urban wood industry potential is.

Hey, it's Ian here. So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on Conscious Design, what it is, how we do it, how you can do it, then check out our book. We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. I think it's such an interesting thing because one of, as I've talked to people, I've talked to people in recycling and kind of across the whole range of product development lifecycle. And one of the things that keeps popping up is that we shouldn't stop spending money on new ideas and new products, right? But there's a lot of this stuff, like what you're talking about, where it's a waste. We're not always looking or haven't been looking at these waste streams because we think of these things as waste. We just go, oh, it's waste, let me throw it away. And now we have this entrenched system where the city would make more money if it sold those trees.

It would save money. So there, I'm going to jump in right there because that's a little bit of a dangerous— I don't want to say dangerous, but a misnomer that creates issues in the industry. I don't recommend because of the challenges Cities are not designed to be businesses. They're designed to be a government. So making those resources available. So right now, and I'm simplifying, but by far the predominant practice across the country is to chip. They'll pay an outside contractor to come in and basically destroy this resource, and it will release that carbon as CO2 equivalent emissions over the next 2 to 5 years or so. They will pay somebody to do that, but they won't make those logs available for free to mills to process them, or they won't even make them available to— so in the case of the way Urban Ashes works, until they start to understand this, our model is very, very similar to traditional recycling for plastic, metal, and glass. So I don't know about Phoenix, it's been too long since I've been there. I'm hoping— or Gilbert, To be specific, which you said, I believe we were talking earlier, you're in Gilbert. Sorry if I divulged where you are, but does Gilbert have a recycling program, curbside pickup for plastic, metal, and glass? Do you know if that is operated by an outside contractor or does the city itself do it?

Third party. Third party takes care of pickup delivery, and I believe it's a third party that then processes.

At a MRF or a transfer station or a materials recovery facility. So, ours is very similar to that. And typically, what's going to happen, I don't know what the contract is there or who the contractors are, the third parties, but there's some arrangement between the municipality and those contractors that typically the city will get a percentage of those sales when they do sell those out to the bigger companies that are going to reprocess that down into whatever. Ours is the same way. So, we set up the whole system and make all the connections and make all the contracts with all the different local mills. We are very, very focused on getting this to local And so to really develop local manufacturing, I have a very strong belief that the urban wood industry is hyperlocal and that's where it succeeds the most.

Right. So you're not paying to ship wood across the country and—

Nope.

Perfect.

We want, I mean, ultimately you're going to need to do that once we get to volume. Some of that's going to happen by nature because only, you know, in small communities, you're going to have potentially a very small community that happens to have a lot of wood. But they don't have a lot of need for wood. And so they're only going to need so much. And so at a certain point, once you tap out those local markets, yes, those materials are going to have to expand out regionally and then potentially nationally. But our goal is not to strip sort of the local resources and take all the local resources from Community A and send it all over to Community X on the other side of the country where Community A doesn't get anything. As far as the resources. So it's very much, and it helped what that, and it really was highlighted during COVID for those who tried to buy any wood along with all the other stuff we tried to buy. You know, the price of wood went through the roof. It was horrible.

I have a brother-in-law that does, builds houses. Yeah.

And that's mostly softwoods, but it really impacted hardwoods too. And I equate it to kind of like solar, rooftop solar is not going to replace The large power plants. It helps supplement it and helps stabilize it. So the more we have this spread out microgrids and things, it helps stabilize when one of those large facilities, in the case of energy, goes down. There's still all these small microgrids out there supplying a good percentage. And that the same thing happens if you talk to urban, most urban mills. Well, first of all, woodmizer being I don't know if they're technically the largest, but definitely one of the most well-known portable bandsaw mills. Their orders for urban mills went through the roof. They went outside like 3 or 4 years out. I'm probably quoting that wrong, but I know they went out very far because people look to see, oh, we need to be more self-sufficient because we just saw the entire international supply chain really crash. The problem is thinking about that then is it's really too late. We need to have the infrastructure in place before the hurricane hits, before the tornado hits, before the pandemic hits, and those kinds of things. So that's our goal is to really help municipalities. But then this goes back to, I think, one of the questions you asked where this was going is we target municipalities because they have the most volume and getting them established as sort of the hub or the Centralized location, the other communities in the area having access to distribute or contribute to this, but then also opening it up to private tree services that they're able to feed into this system as well. And that's where the maximum volume comes in. When you start including all the private stuff, the challenge is if you start out with all private, you're not just dealing with one entity. You're dealing with even a community of, let's say, 100,000 people. There could be 50 to 100 tree services. Now, if we're trying to coordinate all that, that's a whole lot more difficult. So our goal is to actually establish the municipal one first and then open it up to private through the municipal one as a benefit from the municipality back to the community.

And I would imagine that there would be— I don't know if everywhere has private ones of these. This is something living in Western Washington, there's some private basically yard. They provided gravel and bark and stuff like that, but they also would let— because all of the landscaping people, they would let them bring their material in so they could then take it, chip it, something like that. I'd imagine those companies might even be interested in giving you those bigger trees and going, hey, we don't actually want to chip it. Let's sell it to you instead of chipping it because it's Here's my story.

I want to get one— hopefully soon you'll see an animation or a cartoon version of this. I'm trying to get a story done of this and somebody's going to steal my idea and get it out there, but you heard it from me here first.

There we go.

My sort of analogy with this is if you're 10 years old and your parents take you to the bank and open up a bank account with you and you spend the next 50, 60 years taking care of this account, investing in this account, you're so You're proud of this account. It's helped you live, survive, eat, grow, whatever, all of those. It supported your family. And, at a certain age, you decide, okay, I'm going to close out this account. It's run its course. It's done everything it needs to do. You walk into the bank and you say, I want to close my account. I'll take 2 cents on the dollar. You can chip the rest of it. And, that's basically what happens with our urban trees. 2 cents on the dollar is about the value of chips dollar value compared to the current value of hardwood. So are they interested? They're definitely interested. Are they concerned about how they're going to do it and how easy is it going to be? Absolutely. And so that's where we come into play. We become a partner with them. We're going to make this as easy for you as possible. Do we end up having a percentage of this? Absolutely. We're going to make that. We have to survive also because we develop all these systems and make it possible.

But when there's 98% there, that's a lot to share.

Yeah, exactly.

Better value out of it. So that is a horrible value that they're getting out of that.

And it's a challenge. And immediately, like when you said, going back to where you said cities could make a whole lot more money, the core benefits to the city are they're going to save money most likely, and because they're spending money literally destroying the trees. So let's start with that.

So that's actually negative value. Exactly.

So, you know, you saving money is the same way as earning money. And you know, it's, if you're not going to spend it, it's another way you can look at it the same way. It's still a net positive. And then you also look at right now, carbon is becoming more and more critical, particularly with government entities and governments and municipalities are being held accountable for their carbon footprint. And you're seeing more and more sustainability offices and municipalities. This taps directly and you could, this can now feed into that carbon data. Unfortunately, right now we do not have carbon credits for urban wood utilization, though I can guarantee it's being worked on by multiple entities to get in place. So soon that will be an additional benefit back to the city. And again, it'll have to be to scale. You know, if you have small cities, they're going to have to network with other cities. But looking at large cities, Phoenix is a tougher one just because not a massive volume of trees there. And a lot of the trees are—

Cacti on the list. Then we'll be good.

Well, yeah, that's a whole other one. And unfortunately, you guys have some of those dying off just because they can't handle the heat there as well. But, we're going to have more and more dying because of climate change and this shift. We need to find ways to utilize these so we can keep the ones that are healthy and doing well. Let's not cut those down yet until we really absolutely need them. Let them live longer. So, it's not about harvesting. There's always a fear You'll hear with citizens when they hear about there's going to be an urban wood program in their community that, oh, you're going to come in and harvest our street trees and sell them. No, we want that tree up as long as absolutely possible. And then, there's always concern and it's like, well, what can you do with these? They've got metal in them and they're all funky and rotted. And, our goal is to create the model to be able to utilize that. Any Urban Mill a quarter worth its value knows walking into this, you're gonna have to deal with metal and you got to know how to deal with it or you're in the wrong industry.

Yeah, you can have—

they all know how to deal with it, put it that way.

It happens. It's character.

There's competitions, you know, out on the internet, whether on Instagram or Facebook. It's like, who's found the craziest stuff in, you know, in the tree? You'd be amazed at what you'll find in trees. Worse than metal by far. And you know, what I hear from most of the mills is concrete. People seem to think that concrete patches trees. I don't know where they got that from, but it's hard or virtually impossible to scan for concrete. You know, you can scan for metal. You hit concrete with a blade saw or a saw blade, you're going to destroy the blade just about as quickly or quicker than hitting metal.

I would not have thought concrete would just be in.

Yep. People, it's, oh, I got this big hole in my tree. What if I just fill it with concrete?

It won't rot.

And, the tree grows over it and you have no idea what it is actually. You asked me if I had an example to show. I wish I had this photograph up. I can kind of describe it. It's one of my favorite photos. If anybody wants to go to our Instagram page, it is on there probably from 2 years ago. But, just driving around in Michigan here, my wife and I were near one of the small lakes and drove by and I'm yelling, stop, stop, stop. I got to get a picture of this tree. She backs up and there's a tree. I don't know, it's probably 24 inches DBA or diameter. And, you only see half of— there's a children at play sign and the top half is visible. The bottom half is consumed by the tree. It is literally eating the sign. And, I think it's this great— this is what urban trees have to deal with. They're part of our lives. And, it's a great photo. It just gives you a good idea of what urban trees deal with. And then what the mills have to deal with. But they know, like I said, it's a learning curve for sure. Anybody getting into the milling industry, I highly recommend you reach out to other mills that have been doing this a while and talk to them or call Urban Ashes and we're happy to connect you with those mills or help you with ourselves. But it's an industry that's been around as long as humanity because we've been using wood forever, probably since forever. Yeah, exactly.

We figured out how to cut it down and do something with it.

Yeah, it was just laying on the ground. It's, you know, unfortunately, I'm going to pick it up and hit somebody over the head with it, or, you know, hopefully it was better than that. But, you know, that led to fire and cooking and all of those things. What trees provide for us is unbelievable. And we think of them as, even on higher levels, most people will look at them and say, okay, I know they're the lungs of the world, but they're also so much more. Yeah, they define, especially in the design world, Whether you're looking at heat islands in cities and how much they impact things like that, how much they impact the value of your house. If you're just going after pure dollars, there's all kinds of data out there. There's your health. There's a lot of studies showing that people who don't have access to being near trees, their life expectancy is substantially less than those that are around trees. They're just there and we don't necessarily acknowledge them. realize their value. And when they come down, they're still incredibly valuable.

Yeah. It would be interesting for somebody to try to look at how you could even have— because our entire civilization, our entire existence would be nothing what it is without trees. It's somehow such a core piece of everything. Every developmental stage for a long time has been influenced and determined by So yeah, it's a—

yeah, it's, you know, even looking, you're in Arizona and most people don't realize I lived there for 11 years. So I know the state pretty well, but they immediately just think of desert. The state has a tremendous amount of forest and trees. And to the point, you know, to connect directly to your state, it has roughly almost 98 million board feet of urban wood available every year that gets chipped or burned.

98 million. That's a lot for a state with No trees.

Well, don't say that around Flagstaff. That is an entire lumber industry city.

That's true. And, people don't think about it, but mesquite trees, they grow out next to the cacti.

Yep. And, mesquite is spectacular wood. Again, and that's a big part of what we do also, what Urban Ashes does is developing new markets and products for these things, looking at what are things we have. We're currently looking To develop markets for tree of heaven, which is a tree that in the Midwest is, it's an invasive non-native tree almost everybody hates. Cottonwood's another good example. Cottonwood's all over the country and cottonwood's very hard to utilize for multiple reasons. It's got such a high water content in it. It's a very softwood. It also is very tough to dry, so it requires some processing, but it does pretty well for pallets. And things like that. So, and then you see even in the pallet industry, a lot of people are in the last 10, 20 years are converting pallets into another use after their life cycle. So that's still extending its life beyond chipping it and it's gone immediately. And chips are tough. Well, here I say this and now I think about composites. One of the first companies we started helping out of Israel to bring into the US is a wood composite. that's made from wood waste. And, all our initial testing was all done with urban wood waste. So, the sawdust that's coming from the urban mills. So, it's the recycling of the recycled wood already. And so, it's similar to an HDF or an MDF, but what makes it substantially different is that it doesn't have any of the isocyanates or added formaldehyde that MDF and HDF and particleboard and all the other composites do.

Yeah, that sounds nasty.

Yeah, it's all lignin-based binders. It outperforms all the other composites, both on holding screws and water resistance. And then even the bigger thing is you can cast it, injection mold it, and extrude it. It's like Play-Doh is the best way I can describe it. So the first manufacturing in the US coming to Michigan in Muskegon, and it was supposed to open late last year, early this year, but there's been a little conflict going on. in that part of the world. So it's been slowed down a little bit. I think they're currently still targeting 2025 in Muskegon, but we help them get here and understand what markets they could potentially get in and do market development with them.

Amazing.

That's another aspect of it because we generate these logs and we have no place for them to go. Now we're just sitting on logs or lumber that's been processed and there's more, you know, sitting more energy in that. And if those are rotting, then we've expended even more energy to create something that's just going to be released anyways in a short period of time. So we got to make sure that there's end markets for it. So it's in our best interest to do that as well. And since my background's kind of in design and manufacturing, it's kind of a natural sector for me and a lot of 25+ years. Well, in that case, really more like almost 40 years in manufacturing and design.

Right. Well, I love that. Wrapping up here, I have one, my last question here For now is, so we talked a little bit about this. I'm wondering if there's an opportunity and if you, or if you've explored this and partnering with municipalities to maybe help select the trees that they plant in order to add this, because this element of post, right? It's going to die and it's going to be something. How can we increase that value or make that? more useful for you so that in 20, 30, 40, 50 years, whenever that tree comes down again, it's even more useful or easier to use in lumbering and be able to make more value. Yeah.

And it's, you know, we've even talked about it. So absolutely, we're already doing that with the state of Michigan. You know, we're based out of here, so we kind of pilot everything here to some degree. So working on policy, statewide policy, But then also, we do a good amount of consulting with, in conjunction with entities like Davey Tree. We've done some projects with them where they're working with municipality and helping them develop a master plan for their trees. And as part of that, this is where that would fall in there, that they start creating at least an acknowledgement that we should consider this. I mean, it's sort of like the first step, the first baby step. And then ultimately get that into policy that you know when you are you've got all these boxes or whatever to check off. One of them is what kind of quality wood is it? Get that into what's their standard practice, and getting that into there takes some education and then obviously takes some time and repetition. And so we're already doing that, but working on a state level. You know I'd love to see it at a state level having an urban wood policy that includes what you just said and. But also as we go from municipality to municipality and talking to them and even just having the conversation initially, getting it into their head and it's like, oh, I never even thought about it. Yeah, that makes total sense.

It's so logical once you say it. It just— Yeah.

And it may be just as simple as whoever's selecting those trees, getting it to them and they're like, well, yeah, that's a no-brainer. I'll make sure I do that. It may not be written in policy. And the dilemma with that is they don't get it written into their practices. That person leaves and then it stops. That's the challenge. You want to get it written into what are the guidelines or the rules for the city or whoever's—

Right. That checkbox, that checkbox form that needs to be there.

Yep. It's on our radar and there's a lot that are connected to this. There are a lot of elements that are connected with this and it's, we're pretty broad in what we touch on, but it's a very narrow focused industry, if that makes sense. It's a relatively small, relatively new— like I said, 20 years ago, hardly anybody knew what urban wood was. In the last 5 to 10 years, you're starting to see a whole lot more recognition about it, more investment coming from US Forest Service. 20 years ago, I didn't feel like we could get— it was all research and still we're getting some of that. And, at least myself and a high percentage of those folks that have been in the industry for a good period of time, We don't need any more research. We know that it needs to be done and we know that it's viable. It's like we're not going to research this to death. It's like no more viability studies. Let's do it.

It's viable. It's time.

It's viable. Well, that was the whole point of us doing manufacturing like we did. We proved we could do it. I mean, we had challenges and we ultimately shut down our manufacturing, but the main reason was for that was really more on the labor side. And it was the lack of infrastructure and the support systems for labor. So that's why we made our shift. It's like, we got to focus on the infrastructure because this is too difficult for most entrepreneurs or businesses. They're going to get 2 months sick if they even look at it beyond looking at a concept saying, no, I'm not touching that.

Well, and you did it, which, I mean, if you're going to run a viability study, there's nothing like doing it and running into all the real problems. Doing what you did is, oh, here's the main main couple of things. Let's go fix that. And then everybody can do this. This is— it becomes doable for other people, which is—

Yep, absolutely.

The goal.

That's exactly what it is. I want— when I looked at Urban Ashes as a manufacturing company, we were a small manufacturing company and had a very tiny drop of water in the big ocean of impact. And our goal is to have hundreds or thousands of Urban Ashes out there and make it as easy as possible for all of those To be that size or bigger. I mean, we really want to— the urban wood industry is very much, I think I mentioned this earlier, is very hyperlocal and it was really built on small shops, you know, 1 and 2 person little startups and things like that. So we really want to make sure that they're still part of the game and we absolutely need them, but we also need to be able to scale up and create the systems where we can scale to get to that full volume of that 7 to 8 million board feet. The little shops can't do that all alone. But we got to make sure that there's systems. And we now, maybe a good parting here, 25 years ago, there was absolutely no standards, none. And there are now the USRW standards, Urban Salvage and Reclaim Wood standards. For anybody watching this that's interested in that, absolutely go look it up. It's the first standards nationwide for urban wood utilization. It gets into both urban wood and street trees, and it gets into trees that have recently fallen down, but also into deconstructed materials, which we haven't talked about at all. But then, you know, having certification of that these are coming from what they say they're coming from. Right.

It's actually ash if you're, if it says it's ash and things like that.

Well, did this really come from here? Did you just go down to a big box store and buy a whole bunch of this and you're putting a stamp on it? Who's this? So there's transparency and trackability. So there's software out there now. The first software we work with Ancestry. Not the ancestry like human ancestry, but it's Ancestry, T-R-E-E, to give them a plug. We're not, we don't own them, but that's our partner we helped develop. It's basically tracking the tree from the time it comes down all the way through the finished product. So you've got all the carbon and all the tracking involved there. And then that ultimately leads to like potential carbon credits as well as like the certification. Ann Arbor, we're working on to be the first USRW certified city. You know, that's providing material and that it becomes a badge of honor for the city. It's kind of like an art— we're a Tree City USA kind of thing. But also they can include that in their carbon goals or in their sustainability goals, that there's real data and there's real proof that we're actually doing something. Right.

It sounds like it's giving value for them, kind of how like LEED does for buildings. But now this is what used to be waste. Now it's a material stream that you can certify and go, yeah, it's real. It is what it should be. And we're, we're proving it.

Yeah. It's funny you mentioned LEED. When I was working at Ecotimber, I was able to be on some of the very first committees developing specifications for LEED materials. I was focused. I was always been kind of a material hound. And so I got to be part of some of that early stuff in the late '90s on LEED specs, developing that. And now LEED is a worldwide standard. And the goal is to make this just, it's a standard thing we do. It's not anything, it's commonplace. It's no longer something that's really super unique. It is just common practice. And that's our end goal is to make this as commonplace as possible and easy as possible. And LEED and FSC, and it's like, you know, it's so ubiquitous that you see it everywhere.

Yeah. I feel like that's a good goal. Normalize it and make it the thing.

Yep.

Make it so that like the average person, if you say LEED certified, At least has an idea.

So yeah. And FSC is the same way. If you say FSC, they don't know what it is. But I'll say, if you see that little tree, that green tree with a little check, have you seen that? Oh yeah. What is that? Or, you know, it's like they may know that it's— they know it'll say something certified and they may know what that is, but they recognize the brand. And that's what this is about, is creating a brand or an image of urban wood that people recognize. And it's very much about bringing the industry together. and making sure that we're all supporting each other and have good intentions on where this is all going. And for the long haul, like I said, our whole goal is about what's the long haul and supporting these small communities that in some cases it may have been a coal mining community originally. And now it's, you know, it's lost all that. And this is a whole other potential industry for them.

Right. Amazing. Well, this has been wonderful getting to talk to you. I love the fact that you are You've tackled this issue and have made such massive strides while you've been working on it. For people that want to learn more, get in touch with you, work with you, what would be the best place? Do you have a preference or?

Yeah, urbanashes.com is the website. Again, it's just urban, U-R-B-A-N, A-S-H-E-S.com. And there's good video on the front page there. that shows our prototype model here in Ann Arbor and kind of how that would apply to other municipalities and goes through our services. You can also reach out through our contact page there, or you can also reach me directly at PMH, which are just my initials, P for Paul, M as in Marion, H as in Hickman. So pmh@urbanashes.com. And then there's a phone number also on the website. I don't know if you're giving out phone numbers here or not.

We can't, and this will all be in the show notes too.

So, okay.

Yeah.

So that'll all be there. Yeah. Go to the show notes. There you go. That's the best way to reach us. Go back to the show notes of the podcast and you can find out definitely more about us there. And I encourage anybody, a lot of people who may watch all your other shows and stuff may not have a direct connection with trees or things like that, or at least they don't think they do. But if they're living in any community, start asking other community members, or if you're connected with a municipality, like what happens to the trees? Where do they go? And what do you think about If we, you know, we did something with this and just bring it up because people don't, I mean, a lot of them don't even realize it and let them know that, hey, there's actually a whole industry out here and folks that can make this easier for you and all the benefits. So being a local champion is arguably our best advertising, you know, getting local champions and the municipalities want to listen to them. Talk to your legislators. That's who they want. You know, those are the ones that who they're going to listen to. If you're in somebody's constituent and whether it's a city councilman or a state legislator, whatever it is, you call them up and say, hey, you know, this other state's doing this or other city's doing this. What can we do? And, you know, here's some contacts to reach out to. Here's some folks in the industry. This isn't anything unique or crazy trip to Mars. This is really doable. It's been going on. Why aren't we doing this? So that's what folks can do. Here's my ask at the end.

There you go. Perfect. Well, I love it. And yeah, hopefully you've made such good progress, so hopefully this just keeps—

We got a long way to go. We probably haven't even hit 5% of that 7 to 8 billion board feet.

Well, I feel like this is one of those snowball things and you got—

Yeah, it's got a massive ceiling.

Right. You got this first city contract, you'll get more and it'll Eventually snowball and then hopefully—

And that's what happened with our manufacturing. We spent the first 3 years developing the product and once we decided, all right, we're ready to go, in year 4, we went from having 4 shops, I think, to 150. So, and I don't remember how many states, but yeah, once it took off, it took off. But, and I've heard you talk on some of your other podcasts about, you know, you gotta be careful what you wish for. You gotta be ready for it. And that's one thing I have learned as a, you know, business owner, entrepreneur, whatever you wanna call it, is be ready for that because it's a death knell if you're not ready. If you don't have the systems in place and the knowledge and experience in place, that'll put you outta business quicker than not having a good product. You know, if you can't deliver on what you're talking about, it, that'll spread really fast.

Yes, it does. Unfortunately, it's a two-edged sword. Got to do it right. Otherwise, they both, they both sides get you.

Yep. So yeah, take your time, be methodical about it. And like I said, this is a long haul thing. I'm not expecting things to change overnight by any means. And we're here for the long haul because my goal is I want to leave this place better for my kids and your kids and anybody else's kids or the next generations or the Everything, because it's— whether it's leaving it better, but at least slow down the decline or whatever it is, you know, whatever cliché you want to throw on top of that. But I just see this as a massive waste and it's something I feel like I can have a direct impact on and I've gotten pretty passionate about it. That's not clear.

Well, I love it. You have the passion. Hopefully it goes smooth, as smooth sailing as something like this will go. And yeah, thanks for being on the show.

Absolutely. We stay in touch and, you know, hopefully in a couple of years we've got, I don't know, 150 cities.

Perfect.

Or something like that. We'll be in Gilbert. I'll have to be back in Phoenix.

Yeah, that'll be a great reason for you to visit.

Yeah. I'm going to be out there in the next few months out in Arizona. So I may have to track you down.

Sounds good.

All right. Take care.

And that wraps up another episode of the Conscious Design Podcast. If today's episode inspired you to bring your product idea to life and turn it into a sustainable 7-figure business, Visit petermanfirm.com or click the link below. Your ideas have the power to change the world, and we're here to help make that happen. Thank you for joining us, and I'll see you on the next episode.