The Biggest Waste in Construction (and How to Fix It)

We basically, we call it informally an Uber for logs. So we connect tree service companies and arborists to sawmills. So if you are an arborist, you can post that to our platform, and then we work with local sawmills so they can claim that load, and then we coordinate logistics and transport.

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, I'm really excited to have Theo Hooker here. He is a co-founder of Cambium, where they are revolutionizing the crossroads of technology and lumber. So hopefully we'll do more. Well, welcome to the show.

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Absolutely. Well, before we get too far into everything, let's start with what, what got you to decide to tackle this? This is anybody that starts to talk about forestry, lumber, all of that, plus technology. That's like 2 giant worlds combining into one. So what was your What got you to go, yeah, let's, let's co-found something in this space?

I'll give you the 2 parts to the answer. One is sort of the existential, you know, why focus on this type of problem? And then specifically Cambium and how that got started. On the larger picture thing, I'm a big believer that we have a lot of tools to address climate change and fight the climate crisis. And there will be new technology, there will be new inventions. But a lot of ground can be made by connecting systems in a different way, utilizing materials in a new way, looking at trash in a different way, and connecting those dots that haven't been connected before. And so my background is really in, in food and sustainability, but my co-founder, one of my co-founders, Ben, was working at the World Resources Institute looking at reforestation. In the US, we have a lot of land, we can plant a lot of trees. And you zoomed in on urban reforestation and particularly how, you know, the impacts of people and climate. Obviously during the pandemic, we saw a lot of mental health benefits of trees. People loved, you know, outdoor access, parks, et cetera.

Nothing like a global experiment.

Right, exactly. Now we have some, we have the, the proof. We didn't know before, but now we're, now we're sure. But he kept finding more and more of these examples of this massive amount of wood waste that didn't fit neatly into the traditional lumber industry. And so the fundamental idea was, or the question was, there has to be a way to connect this wasted material into the supply chain that already exists, that already is processing this type of material just from a different source. Turn it into, into a valuable product and then reinvest those profits and value back into tree planting into those communities. And since then, you know, we kept pulling the thread and finding more and more of these pockets of wasted material. So from wildfire mitigation efforts on the West Coast to hurricane disaster relief on East Coast and everything in between. There's so much that doesn't fit neatly into the traditional lumber industry. And part of that, our hypothesis was and still is that having technology, having visibility and chain of custody data and tools to not only identify that material, quickly connect it to the supply chain, to sawmills, to manufacturers, and then enable that view and that data to be accessible by customers was a key linking component to make this material more accessible.

Amazing. As soon as you mentioned supply chain, there's a lot to deal just in that pocket of what you've been talking about. But kind of jumping to one of the first things you talked about is you thinking of, you know, there's a lot of solutions out there and that one of the things that I lived by basically is I'm convinced 100% we have all the solutions. We just have not put them in the right spot necessarily. It's one of those— I've worked in all kinds of industries and it's always fascinating to see when you step into a new industry and realize, oh, they've actually solved something. If you could just take that and move it over here, this other industry, it would, it would blow their minds and solve so many problems. And so I love that idea of going, hey, let's actually look at Look at all those things and then, yeah, reconnect the dots in a different, different way. So love that, love that kind of thinking process that creates these kind of solutions. So let's get into what exactly material, like we talk about wood and you're talking about like waste wood. And I have a lot of people, there's everything from what you were talking about. Even people have spoken about the fact that like when a city trims their trees, There can sometimes, you know, a tree falls down, right? It gets just thrown away or burned at best.

Not bad.

Maybe it's just, it's most likely just put in with all the other yard debris and nobody gets anything out of it. There's no benefit. What are you creating with? So you have all this very different material, which up until now most people go, well, that's cool. That's not valuable. What are you— what have you been able to do with that to be able to turn that on its head and go, no, it's actually, it's actually worth something. You should, you should use it.

Yeah, we have the way we talk about our business because it does span the entire supply chain. So it is, there are a lot of moving parts. The way we break it down is by the products and the services that we offer. Some of those are physical, some of those are digital. So on the physical product side, we really have 3 core product avenues. One is structural applications for mass timber. So the leading product there is cross-laminated timber, obviously for low, medium, high-rise buildings. Instead of using entirely, or maybe in some capacity, steel and concrete, we can use lumber.

Yeah.

That's growing as a movement across the country. Manufacturing is growing in lots of ways, and we just saw a real opportunity to integrate salvaged material into that supply chain because on a per board basis, the actual grade or character is less important when these panels are pressed and combined together. So that's one product we're really excited about and bringing that to market in bigger ways. The next one is millwork non-structural components, so interior. flooring, accent walls, ceilings, and then exterior decking, fencing, siding. We have a handful of products and species there. And then lumber for furniture companies. So if you want to invest in a local or more sustainable material, you want to have local manufacturing, we can help connect that into the supply chain or into your existing supply chain there. So those are our physical products. And Again, we work across from sawmills to wood, you know, secondary processors to that manufacturer or end customer or brand company to make that possible. And then part of making that possible is then we go to the digital offerings that we have. So across that supply chain, if you think of it in 3 stages, getting fallen fiber or wasted material in, so in log form, traditionally, getting that to sawmills. That's stage 1. Stage 2 is then turning that log into lumber and to a usable sort of raw material. That's stage 2. And then stage 3 is turning it into a final product and getting it to a customer. So we have a handful of digital tools that plug in at each stage there. So on that front end, we basically, we call it informally an Uber for logs. So we connect tree service companies and arborists to sawmills. So if you are an arborist, you collect a lot of logs throughout your, you know, weekly or monthly jobs to fill a truck. You can post that to our platform and then we work with local sawmills so they can claim that load and then we coordinate logistics and transport. So right now we're active in the Northeast, in the Mid-Atlantic. We're starting in the Southeast.

Got it.

to deploy that. And then eventually we'll scale into, you know, other wood baskets of the country, from Upper Midwest, Pacific Northwest, et cetera. And then we have internal tools for tracking material. So from chain of custody perspective, from sawmills to wood products companies to end use, we want to be able to show where that material came from, who touched it, and the associated carbon and impact metrics. associated with that.

Show people, yeah, it is really the same wood we collected. There's no, there's no bait and switch. We didn't burn it anyway. And it's real lumber.

Yep. And part of that too is, you know, with an eye towards adoption in a bigger way, we are working with large industrial sawmills who accessing salvaged material, but because the market is relatively new and growing, You know, they're not spending time and energy to separate that fiber out. So you might get, say, oh, right, you know, 100 logs that go into the system that are from a salvaged source, but they just get mixed in with the 1,000 other logs that they would be getting from their traditional sources.

So they haven't been, they just look at it and go, can we use it? Yes, no. Okay.

Exactly.

And rather than saying, oh, 1% is from this, there's no Tracking of that yet.

And so that's where we want to not only promote that. So if you're, you know, a company and you have specific grade expectations or something like that, we can offer a blended offering. Basically, we know that, you know, this batch of wood you're getting is going to be 20% salvaged material because of the sawmill that we work with and we have that tracking. Or we can do the one-for-one, you know, say this exact board. is what you're getting. Obviously those are different price points and different, you know, levels of engagement in that supply chain that's required. But with an eye towards adoption with these bigger mills and bigger clients, trying to get this tiered approach so you can start, say it's a 20%, then very similar to FSC or other recycled products.

Okay.

What do we need to do to get to 50, 60, 70, right, percentage, you know, of salvaged material? So there's a few avenues there that we are both then combining our physical products with our digital products to enable more access, both on the supply side with sawmills and then obviously the demand side and customers. So that's a little bit of an overview of how we think about getting more material in and pulling more material out.

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Got it. And then as a company, right, if you're at the consumer level, then you have, if you're, if you're doing the tracking, right, you can say, with certainty, hey customer, this chair is made out of either a percentage, we could, it could be something like that where it's, hey, it's 80% recycled, recovered, however they wanna term it.

Right.

Or they could even, even opt for 100% or whatever that blend is. But then that's something that you can, as a brand, be able to share ultimately, 'cause the end, the end customer is the one The one that everyone's gotta, gotta show something to for it to all be worth it. But you can actually, you're actually able to do that then if you're using your guys' technology.

Correct.

I'm curious, how has the rollout, obviously you're growing, how's the rollout been of being Uber for locks? I guess a very interesting, and I know there's a lot of innovation on like the truck, trucking industry in general, just material transportation is Kind of keeps getting turned on its head. I feel like there's a lot of waste and things. So how, I guess, what have you been seeing as you've been going through and how's that, how's that gone in terms of getting people on board of think, even thinking about things that way? Because it's, it's a totally different process than just throwing it back in your, your truck and then dump it off at the, the yard waste location.

Right.

Yeah, we look at it through a few different lenses that this is first a group or a few different groups that have not had technology built for them. So arborists go throughout their, their normal day and they typically get logs from those, you know, from their, from their jobs. And if likely, the easiest solution is to cut it up into small chunks and chip it or take it to a landfill. Right. Yep.

They chip her on site, right?

You gotta empty the load and get to the next job. If they're lucky, you know, if they have a, a truck or a loader that can actually support logs, they might call someone. They might have a guy or a connection who, you know, they'll come by and, you know, give 'em $1,000 for the logs or something like that.

But yeah. Like maybe a firewood scenario for sale. Like that's, that's one of the few things I could think of you could value enough.

Right. And part of that is inconsistent in the demand. You don't know if someone's going to want it or not. And also lack of transparency in what you're actually valuing the material as. Maybe one month you get $1,000, next month you get $1,600 or something like that. But it's, there's no transparency in what you're getting.

Mm-hmm.

And so the main service offering for them is we can give you a consistent and transparent revenue line for what you originally thought of as a liability and a waste from these projects and make it really easy for you to, you know, take a picture, prep the logs, and get someone to come in and pick it up. So that's really the main value proposition to these arborists is providing them another revenue stream to their business and making it easy to move that material.

Right. Making it actually worth Not chipping it. Basically, you have to be more worthwhile than renting a chipper for 4 hours and chipping it.

Right. And, and if there's, you know, we're starting to do some customer research on, you know, homeowner had to choose between an arborist that took part in this type of system versus one that didn't. I don't know. We don't have any hard data on this, but I would assume that a lot of homeowners would prefer that the arborist that contributes to this type of Salvaging now becomes a marketing tool for the arborist to say, hey, we don't just burn everything that we get from you.

We, we actually can go be useful.

Right. And then to the next stage, or I'll, I'll jump over the truckers for now, I'll come back, but then to the sawmill. And, you know, the, the very basic value proposition is we can get you more material. And obviously we have standardized grades and it's very transparent and easy to coordinate and grade. You know, if you claim a, a log, log or a load and it's not graded properly, or you actually get a bunch of, you know, subpar logs that you can't actually use, you can grade that, give that feedback to the arborist. And that's, you know, similar to your, you know, rating system. You can be like, I was like on 2-star load. And you obviously, as an arborist, you want to—

Are you able to help?

Because I wouldn't, at least most arborists that I know, they're not necessarily grading, right? They're just They're going, hey, here's a tree, chopped it down. Now we're done. Like grade. Whereas like what you're talking about, the mill, lumber mill, they grade. They're like, oh yeah, here's, here's the grade. We know exactly what it is. We know based, based on all that. So are you, you're helping to connect those 2 dots and facilitate that kind of grading system?

Yeah.

And it's kind of, you know, imagining, there's obviously, there's only so much you can know by just looking at the, you know, the butt end of a log.

Right.

Once you open it up, you see all the, whatever's inside. And so our goal is to make sure the arborist knows the checklist of things that they can do to ensure that they get the highest value for their logs, which is really, you know, is it straight or is it curved? Is it, you know, these sort of visual indicators It should translate to a higher price per log there. And we have a whole sort of log prep video course that arborists can take. So, you know, how to—

Oh, awesome.

Organize them, how to prep them, how to cut them so that it's really easy for a trucker to come and load them and go. And those are all parts of the, you know, process that an arborist gets, could get dinged on or, or, you know, graded on. Through the process. And then the sawmill, obviously, once they open it up, then they can actually, they get summarized reports of that load. So we can say of the logs, of the species, here's actually what we got from there. And we can then cross-reference, okay, this is what we thought, this is what we got. Was it accurate? Was it off? What'd we miss? That kind of thing. And so that's where we're getting a lot of data to be able to hopefully make those as close as possible. Over time.

Right.

Eliminate some of the potential errors.

Exactly. And then the last piece, obviously, as you mentioned, there's a lot of variability across trucking, across regions, across types of thing, types of goods that are being transported. And what we really wanna do is build relationships with these small independent trucking companies to just give them another source to be able to, to transport loads. We actually work with a lot of groups that use us on their backhauls. So they have a shipment set up going in one direction, and then their truckers can just check our platform on their way back to see if they could pick up a load, uh, instead of just wasting—

Eliminating some of those empty— yeah, there's some crazy— I forget what the percentage is exactly, but I know it's a— there's a crazy amount of empty load, just drives where it's just, I need the truck here. I gotta get it there whether something's in it or not. I still need the truck and the bed over there.

Yep.

To then transport something. So that's great. So you're able to actually be, some of these companies are actually able to tap into yours as these additional, maybe we can fill up some of those empty and make it not a wasted waste, not really waste, an inefficient trip. We'll call it that.

Exactly. Exactly. And that's where, you know, Right. When you look at this part of the supply chain, you have these 3 players, the arborists or the folks, you know, salvaging the material, the sawmills who want it, and then the truckers who are getting it from point A to point B. When we think about zooming out, how do we actually make change in the supply chain? Looking and having the demand pull helps this whole system go. So from a very early on—

Right.

Very early on, it can be advisors, friends, mentors cautioned us that we were doing too much. We were trying to approach, you know, too much of the supply chain. And there's, there's wisdom in that, of course. But now we're at a point where because we do work across the supply chain, because we can speak the language of all these different players, because we can play with all these leverage points, supply input, processing, and then demand, can actually get more adoption of our technology, but also of the material itself, which is exciting to see start to actually be a real benefit to us.

Right. I wanted to ask you about, you said arborists and other, but you've, you've also mentioned, you know, forest fire prevention. There's also just after, after forest fire cleanup, there's so many different ways. Kind of what areas have you found Are the most, 'cause I'd imagine there are certain scenarios where maybe the material isn't good enough to be used. So how, I guess, what are the areas that you're seeing that are really good that have been working for you to actually get quality enough to actually be worthwhile? And are there any that you've tried and then maybe they just not, not worked out as areas that you can't expand into?

Sure. And do you mean areas in, you know, product or end uses or like geographic regions or actual species?

Like Products, like, yeah, I'm imagining you could probably operate most of the US at least.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would. And no, and I think we're, we're, we are doing that actively and across hardwoods and softwoods there. So on the product side, we think of it, you know, where we are now in terms of mass timber millwork and furniture, you really ask over the last 4, 4 or 5 years of understanding what the market needs are and what people want versus what's actually possible with salvaged material, the quality, the consistency, et cetera. We feel really good about these 3 offerings in terms of, you know, in many ways we have the SKUs mapped out. We have our, for the millwork side of things, we have our profiles.

Yeah.

We have our dimensions. We don't feel like we need to expand anymore.

Right, right.

You know, we've kind of gotten the subset of species that are available and Now, and then, you know, matching that with the demand and what we think will continue to grow. And so now it's just continuing to build the supply chain for scale, integrating technology to make it more seamless, and really pushing forward across those. And just as a tangible example, I think one product particularly for outdoor applications is thermally modified red oak. In the Mid-Atlantic and lots of parts of the US, we have a lot of red oak. But it's not really in design, you know, high design these days. People don't want to rust it. It's had its heyday, but now it's really being chipped and wasted or just used as pallets. A lot of pallet manufacturers utilize red oak 'cause it's available there.

Nobody else wants it. So.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Um, so through a process called thermal modification, which is just a natural high heat drying process, We can turn red oak into— that normally does not do well outside— into a rot and weather resistant product that is price competitive and performance competitive with your, you know, tropical hardwoods, your plastic composites, and certainly your—

Without doing a chemical— because I know one of the favorites is just chemical treat the lumber, and that's one Right. One way to make anything resistant.

Right. Yeah, we had that thought and we're like, wait, no, that's— we don't want to go down that path. But no, just so thermal modification, it's not a new technology or innovation. It was originated in Northern Europe, I think almost 2 decades ago, but has just started to come into the US sort of mainstream manufacturing sort of infrastructure. But it is a high heat, low oxygen, no oxygen kiln. That, okay, basically you bake the material. So you are baking off these starches and sugars that bacteria, fungi, bugs would traditionally eat. All the food groups. Exactly. Right. And then you're actually closing the pores to make material more hydrophobic and water resistant. And so we're really excited about, you know, thermally modified red oak. Similarly, we're working, doing some tests for thermal Poplar and other offerings.

So it's not speed— you, you're at least testing, but you think you can use it on multiple species of wood? It's not limited to just—

Correct. Yep. So we have thermal red oak, we have thermal pine, we're starting to do thermal poplar and get that out more and more. Thermally modified soft maple is actually an interesting option because it, it's something about maple that Doesn't make it usable outside.

Okay.

But you get this really rich, almost walnut-looking interior offering.

Interesting.

So it changes, kind of imagine if you're baking it, it's going to have some physical look changes. Is that, or does it retain, does it still, like when you put the red oak through, does it still basically look like red oak or is it No, that's— Is it a cosmetic change too? Is it something where, like, from an architectural interior design standpoint, it could be an interesting material because it's— you— there is no other way to get that?

You're right, it is also a cosmetic change as well. So like I mentioned, traditional red oak is not really in design trends anymore, a little too red. So after thermal modification, thermal red oak becomes this beautiful chocolate brown color.

Oh wow. Okay.

And obviously if you wanted to put an additional sealant or finish on it, it sort of retains that color a little bit longer. But then it would—

Is it still stainable? Like, is it take stain and things like that as easily? Did you know?

Yeah, it would do a finish, you know, just UV protectant or something like that. We have seen, we do have some options that add some color tones to it. You could go lighter, you could go a little bit darker. But traditionally folks just want like the wood cut, the wood, and they also, it'll gray out in a patina similar to other outdoor wood products over time. And so adding a layer of finish can just help preserve that color if that's what you want as well. And so similar pine, poplar, soft maple, there's a cosmetic change that happens that it's usually a darkening of that species. Okay.

Interesting.

Usually, I mean, there's dry— people have been drying lumber for a long time, but not really high heat. So I guess that's the innovation is using a temperature where it doesn't self-combust, but it is still a lot higher than what you think of as like drying in a lumberyard or something that before or after processing, right? It's exactly something. It's a different temperature than that. Okay. Interesting. Well, that's exciting to see.

Yeah.

Because there's obviously there's a push, people want more natural, but then they also want it to survive outside, which puts chemical treated at odds, but limiting options. So that's very cool to hear that you guys have this, that this is starting to come around and you're able to use it on multiple species.

And just last point to add on that, I think One of our, what we see one of our big goals or responsibilities in this space is to educate and provide a look into, you know, how the sausage is made, so to speak. So, and particularly with current offerings, whether it's pressure-treated or chemically treated material or even tropical hardwood, we are, a common question we get is, okay, great, how does this compare to IPE? As an example, we can't argue that ipe is one of the best, strongest, toughest, most, you know, long-lasting natural wood materials out there. It's grown in the rainforest. It's made to be in harsh environments with lots of bugs.

It lives there.

It just lives there. You can't argue with that. And it's important to understand the process that is required to turn, to make your, you know, 100-square-foot ipe deck. Or your boardwalk made out of IPE and the—

That's not cutting pine.

Exactly. And that's, it's not only the, you know, the land, actual like number of trees, the actual acres of material that is required for that, but then obviously the shipping and all the pieces that to get that to where you are. And I think it's, so our perspective is, you know, we can't convince you to, or we can't make you make a decision one way or another, but we want you to have all the information to be able to Impact of that product decision.

Well, if you can actually make a comparison, then you can have— I think it's that informed decision. Whereas if you just look, if all you know is that, then you go, okay, well, yeah, jungle wood, of course it's going to do great. I'll put it outside. It'll be fine.

Right.

And not— but if you don't have that comparison, or if you're going, well, it's either that or pressure washed, which that doesn't look good, or chemical, that's not like your options are those the only things that come to mind, then, right, if you have the money for it, you're just gonna— you're just gonna pick that because there's no other options. So definitely the education. I feel like as people know more, then it's, oh, there is— there's actually another option that isn't this ugly stuff that nobody wants or super expensive. Amazing. I'm curious, as far as the material that you're able to intake, right, you obviously have to grade. You can't just, you know, I can't hand you a stick from the, from the ground that's like this thick. It's not gonna be what you're looking for. So kind of what is the range of raw material input that you can actually use? Obviously it doesn't have to be a giant oak tree, but what kind of parameters have you found actually gets you that raw material?

Yep.

That you can, that a lumber mill will actually buy, that you can actually use. What does that, what does that look like?

Very technically with the, the Uber for Logs platform, which is called Mill Market, forgot to mention that earlier.

Uh, important.

There's very clear size constraints or carry minimums that we have to hit. So it's really, you're looking at 16 to 18 inches minimum, uh, DBH diameter at breast height to make that worth anyone's while on the sawmill side of things. And then You need at least 8 feet 6 inches long from— and if you look at a tree standing, you can kind of imagine from the stump or where you would cut the stump, which is as close to the ground as possible, to just beneath the first branch. When branches start to come in, that's where you see knotting and just variation in material.

Quality. Quality for use. Yeah, knots are not fun.

Right. And so that's, that's the basic, you know, size parameters from an intake perspective. And then obviously, you know, when you're thinking, when we're thinking about biomass and the whole tree mentality is obviously the trunk is just one part. You have the crown, you have the branches, you have all this other. And so a lot of our focus is on the log because that has the potential to be the highest value. recycled or salvaged part of it. We're starting to do more work on the biomass side of things.

Okay.

So where, what, what can we do with all that? The branches, the leaves, the, you know, the everything else that we have obviously so much more volume of compared to the log that comes from a single tree. So we're working on that. And then you asked earlier about the product offerings or the array of products, and we really think that across mass timber, millwork, furniture. Within that, we can span a pretty big array of grades to meet those product expectations. And those, we try to map those as much to existing grading certifications as possible. So what if it's hardwood, working with the NHLA, the National Hardwood Lumber Association, or on the softwoods, the National Softwood Association board to see, okay, what are we talking about and how does that map to on the hardwood side? You know, your FAS and select grades to number 1 common to number 2 common. And pretty much we can match a lot of material to that. And then obviously that helps with right-sizing pricing, with right-sizing volume and expectations across the board. So really what we're trying to do, we're not trying to like reinvent the wheel here. A lot of this has been figured out. So it's more of a mapping exercise.

Right. You're going, here's the wheel. How do we, how do we line it up so that we're not doing playing over here where nobody actually has a supply? You're really just going, okay, well, what can we get that somebody was going to throw away? And then where does it— where can it plug in? What are the channels? If this company wants grades X through Y, cool. Let them make sure those are getting in, in a truck and going to them. And then how do you just, again, connecting the dots but not reinventing the dots?

Right. Well, and that's, you know, you said it exactly. It's going back to the, the point I made at the, you know, at the beginning is just putting in the effort that has not been done to map this sort of underutilized, undressed material to the existing system and make that as easy as possible. And so that's really how we think about, you know, whether it's grading material input, Just getting into the system and then work with big groups like FSC, SFI, who are setting these certifications and the standards for sustainable forest management and things like that. Salvaged material is a very new concept in relation to those grades. And so working with them, again, we don't want to be a new certification body. That's, it's a whole kettle of fish we don't want to mess with.

That's a whole other layer above everything.

We just wanna make sure that our, the data that we're collecting across the supply chain, the standards we're setting with arborists, sawmills, et cetera, can map to these existing systems.

Right. A is A, not something else. It's still, if you need A, you get A, and that's no confusion. Amazing. Well, I love that. I think it's, I think it's really important people come up with, there's a lot of innovation. And anytime you can do something where you don't have to have this massive leap in behavior of everyone, that's where you get the fastest and the most highest acceptance rates. So it's, I love what you guys are doing. You're thinking about this so that, hey, how do we make it arborists or whoever, whoever's chopping the tree down, how do we make it easy for them to go? Yeah, this is good. Here you go. Here's the logs. Take it away. Connecting everything so that you're not— no one per— like everyone's changing their behavior a little bit, which effectively you're making a pretty big change when you stack up all their behavior changes together, but you're not loading one person up and going, all right, you have to change. You have to do a 180 here. And then nobody else does anything else. You, you're taking it all on yourself. You're letting it be this spread-out increment. See, it feels like incremental but adds up. I feel like it adds up pretty quickly by the time you're done with the system. So I know system changing, whole system is big and challenging as all your advisors have talked about, but I feel like when you can execute it well, it's actually less pressure. I feel like there's a lot of less pressure. that happens when you do it that way, even though it's, it is big and scary when you—

It's different. That's where we see, you know, to your point of what we have the solutions, I think that's where when those things start to come together, that's when we see the real impact across the system.

Right, right. Well, I love it. And this has been, this has been a pleasure. I love talking about what you guys are doing. Before we wrap up, I wanted to make sure, and I know you shared The app name, but if there's any other things that people should be aware of, and then also what's the best way to reach out to you, connect with you? If municipalities— I've talked to some people about, you know, the city. The city has their own contractors that take out trees and redo— like, that's a whole supply chain for you guys. Anybody, like, how— what's the best way to reach out to you guys, connect, potentially partner?

Yeah, I would say the failsafe, cambiumcarbon.com. We have a contact form. Shoot us a note there. Let us know who you are and what you're interested in. That's the easy one. But breaking it down a little bit, because we do have a lot going on. If you are on the salvage side, so arborist, tree service company, trucker, Mill Market is where to go. So it's just millmarket.net. There's contact forms and you'll be directed to the right folks there. If you are in the wood products world, in the manufacturing side, whether it's a sawmill or a wood products company, or on the demand side of architect, designer, you know, using wood in some way and want to learn more, head over to carbonsmartwood.com. That gives an overview of our materials, our offerings, and obviously there's a contact form as well. You can reach me. My email is just theo@cambiumcarbon.com. Happy to chat. And yeah, we look forward to hearing from anyone.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking your time to talk, and I'm looking forward to see what else you guys do and the impact you can make.

Amazing. Thanks so much for having me, Ian. It's been a pleasure.

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.