The INSANE Amount of Wood Cities Throw Away! #SustainableLiving #citylife #shorts #wood

25 Feb 2025 · 1 min

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0:39

In this short, the speaker explains that most U.S. municipalities handle wood waste by contracting companies to chip and destroy it, a process that releases the wood’s stored carbon as CO₂‑equivalent emissions over the next two to five years. The cities also refuse to provide the resulting logs to lumber mills for reuse, effectively discarding a valuable resource. The speaker contrasts this with the Urban Ashes model, which treats wood waste like traditional recycling streams—plastic, metal, and glass—by making the material available for processing rather than incinerating it.

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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. So in the case of the way Urban Ashes works, our model is very, very similar to traditional recycling for plastic, metal, and glass.