This month we’re featuring wood from a unique source.  We have been affectionately calling the material “Pit Wood,” because it is being excavated from a mud pit 80 feet wide and 1,400 feet long!  This Redwood and Douglas Fir was a wooden platform at a cattle feed plant built in the 1930′s.

For 50 years train cars would dump sugarbeet pulp down an incline to the platform where the pulp was mixed with cattle feed to be reloaded onto train cars and transported to feedlots. The feed plant was closed in the 1980′s and the platform lay untouched, preserved in the mud, until the Summer of 2009.

Don’t let these timbers’ muddy origins bog you down! The platform lumber looks very old but is in good condition. Wood doesn’t decay underground due to the lack of oxygen, so this material is perfectly sound, and much of it is straight as the day it was milled over 70 years ago!

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We sure are keeping busy here at Crossroads Recycled Lumber. The details of our new yard, Pacific Northwest Timbers, are developing, and Marc & family will be spending the month of January up in Port Townsend house-sitting and getting the new office in order. All very exciting!

Last week we had a quick and hard snow. Monday through Wednesday I couldn’t make it up the hill to work and got a few snowdays for a break. Thursday I was pleased to make some connections at the San Joaquin Valley Regional Green Jobs Summit held in Fresno and put on by the Latino Environmental Advocacy Program. The event was very well attended by people of diverse ages and backgrounds. I was very happy to see an event of this calibur in our own community. For more info read here: http://sjvleap.wordpress.com/

This week I’ve been working on four newsletters that will be sent out over the coming months. The topics include: Barn Wood, Pit Wood (you’ll just have to wait to read about what that is!), Timbers from Warner Bros Studios, and Redwood. If you’re not on our mailing list yet, submit your name and e-mail address in the left-hand bar of our website. Our newsletter features are very low-volume, so don’t worry about being inundated with info and advertisements on recycled lumber. As much as we love to talk about our product, we know you’re all as busy as we are and don’t have time to read a million e-mails. However, if you’re just aching to fill your time up reading about reclaimed lumber, browse our website! There’s quite a bit of information in here.

Take care and enjoy the winter season.
-Sophie

Hello valued customers and friends! I’m writing today with exciting news! We are about to open Crossroads new sister company; Pacific Northwest Timbers in Port Townsend, Washington! The new yard will be on Seton Road in Port Townsend, right down the road from Edensaw Woods. More news to come on this later, the business paperwork has just been submitted.

Crossroads’ first-ever Newsletter is about to be launched!  I’ve been working on this baby for around a month now, trying to get all the details just right.  Looking at other examples of newsletters, Crossroads’ is going to be a little different.  Many newsletters I see are full of different articles on various topics.  But Crossroads’ is going to be simple, with the basic goal of reminding our subscribers about what we do and letting them know what’s in our VAST inventory, by featuring a different product or process each month or so.

When you think about the whole lifetime of the lumber out in our yard, recycling wood becomes a very sentimental business.  I want to share all aspects of this with our friends and customers.  In the newsletter I want to give light to the lifespan of the wood, from characteristics of the living trees that were logged to the historic sources of the wood we have.  I want to share with everyone the different processes, tools, and machines we use to turn salvaged wood into usable lumber, and the beautiful finished projects that our lumber makes.  I’m sure that there will also be more to share about our business as we change and grow over the next few years.

I’ve been pleased to see that our mailing list is growing, both from my outreach and from the sign-up boxes on our website (bottom of the left menu bar) and our Facebook page (Become a Fan on Facebook…).  I look forward to sharing a little bit about Western Yellow, or “Knotty” (NOT “naughty”), Pine in our first feature in the next couple of weeks.  As soon as I figure out how I want to do the danged formatting.

Stay tuned….

-Sophie

A California architect wrote to us asking how “the cost of recycled lumber compares to [Forest Stewardship Council] certified lumber.” Below is Marc’s answer.

Generally reclaimed costs more than conventional and FSC lumber primarily because of the labor involved in the recycling process. This includes:

1. Saving the lumber from demolition/construction projects
2. Cleaning the lumber (it can be full of nails and other objects like hangers, electrical conduit, tar paper etc, all of which needs to be cleaned and sorted)
3. Remilling the boards and any finishing required

Loss of board footage when remilling also makes a higher price for reclaimed lumber.

We often pay more than the price of new for reclaimed lumber off the demo site. The first reason we are willing to pay more is that the market has demanded reclaimed materials, and because we believe in recycling this wood. Secondly, the old wood is usually much higher quality than new so we can provide a better product to our customers.

New lumber is presently cheaper than it has been in 25 years, so it is a particularly tough time for reclaimed lumber to compete. The low price of harvested lumber is in part due to the fact that NAFTA has prevented the US from being able to tax Canadian imports, which would allow US companies to be competitive. This not only means bad news for our local lumber mills, but also that most lumber coming into the country now has been shipped thousands of miles from Canadian forests, burning fuel and contaminating the air.

FSC is generally 15% more costly than conventionally harvested lumber. A specified tally (exact list, rather than buying a truckload of random sizes) of reclaimed is often 2 to 3 times as much as FSC certified, especially if the reclaimed has to be remilled.

There are times when we have a large volume of a certain size of material in its raw form and we can be competitive. Right now we have Douglas Fir 2×6 T&G Decking and 4x12x20′ beams in large quantities. This would be structural material as it came out of the building, visible nails pulled but not resurfaced. We can have the old wood regraded by certified graders and again that adds to the cost.

Best thing to do is check in with your lumber tallies and see what we have available at the time.

We appreciate your interest in reclaimed wood and commend you on designing affordable housing as green as you can afford to.
I hope and somewhat expect building green will be affordable for most people sooner or later.

Best wishes, Marc

Here I am back home in the Valley (well, the foothills) after 5 exciting years in Santa Cruz and Chile. At 23 I’m living with my mom and working for my dad, but I dig it.

My job right now is doing outreach for my dad’s business, Crossroads Recycled Lumber in North Fork, California.  I’m supposed to get our name out there and let architects and institutions that are building green know primarily about reclaimed lumber, and secondarily about Crossroads. I really enjoy doing this. I spend mornings pulling nails or milling boards with the guys in the yard, and afternoons here in the office doing outreach and making connections.

My dad’s been doing the Recycled Lumber thing for years now, since before I was born. When I was a kid he worked different jobs throughout the year, logging in the summer, construction or demolition in the winter. When he worked demolition he would salvage lumber, doors, windows, whatever was salvageable from wrecking jobs. The house I grew up in, that he built with help from friends and neighbors, was nearly 100% reclaimed. Even my first pets were salvaged when Dad was on a demolition job and the two cats (Ishi and Mr. Brown) that had belonged to the abandoned building were left homeless. Crossroads took off when I was about 7, after Dad finally bought a sawmill and could do custom milling instead of just selling pieces “as is.”

Today the business is strong (well, less so in this economy), with a few guys working in the yard, the old Woodmizer Mill, and a couple planers Dad’s picked up to finish boards. I’m extremely proud of our family business. In October, before I was hired by UCSC to coordinate their Campus Earth Summit, I worked here doing some research for the website they were revamping. I had this fear in the back of my mind that during my research I would find some kind of terrible flaw in the Recycled Lumber process and discover that Reclaiming and Remilling Timbers is actually horribly unsustainable! I was pretty into the biodiesel idea when I was younger, and now the sustainability community has discovered that using vegetable products is not exactly an end-all solution to the fuel crisis so I learned not to invest in one idea too much. But no, after doing that research I am an even greater proponent of using reclaimed lumber and what we’re doing here at Crossroads.

The benefits behind reclaimed lumber are many fold, and in comparison to other building materials I see few drawbacks. Lumber in and of itself is a beautiful, natural building material. It is easy to work with and sturdy. But logging and using virgin timber has gained a negative reputation. As I mentioned, my dad worked as a logger when I was a kid, and he feels strongly that logging can be done not only responsibly, but is even necessary to maintain forests and control fires. However, it is fact that uncontrolled logging can destroy natural habitats for forest flora and fauna, contribute to disrupting a forests’ natural carbon cycle (which in turn affects the planet’s climate and our air quality), and disrupts the natural water cycle (which can reduce soil cohesion and lead to natural disasters like landslides and flooding).

In the last 15 years or so, sustainable forestry has taken off, and guides such as Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) Certification can provide some assurance that virgin timber was grown and harvested responsibly. However, even FSC certified virgin lumber takes a LOT of energy to harvest. Just try to imagine how much oil and human energy it takes to fell trees, and then how much it takes to ship those logs on semi-trucks all over the country (mostly from Canada and the Pacific Northwest). If anyone can actually find that statistic, I would love to know what it is.

When I was still in high school I went with my dad one weekend to scope out a building in Fresno. That’s a big part of the job- checking out demolition/deconstruction sites to make sure there’s enough quality wood to make it worth the effort to salvage. Anyway, it was an old winery and I remember thinking how beautiful it was, the brick walls all seemed structurally sound with wisteria crawling up around the old windows. Dad said there wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with the building, they just needed to tear it down to make room for an industrial park or something like that. It was so sad and disturbing to me that they (I don’t even necessarily know who “they” are) would tear down something so beautiful and so useful, just because they had a vision for something else.

Look around at the buildings you see in your daily life and think about every board, every brick, every nail that makes them and just take a moment to consider where they came from. Consider the process and the human power it took to harvest the raw materials, to process them, even consider the work it took to create and maintain the tools used to mill each board, to melt down the ore and alloy it to make steel, to set and hammer each board into place with each nail. It’s a tremendous amount of time and energy, and it’s what people spend their LIVES doing. That winery was torn down. Crossroads bought some of the beams and “they” probably recycled some of the metal because you can get money for it, but I don’t think anyone around here recycles bricks. All of that beautiful red brick must have gone to the landfill, and the careful hard work of the brick makers and the masons to create a product that will last, is gone.

That respect for human effort, as much as the environmental impact, is why recycling is so important to me. According to the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, logging has a fatality rate 21 times higher than the rate for all workers (thank you Wikipedia!), so not only did people work very hard to bring the lumber around us down from mountains to be used all over the world, but they literally risked their lives. To see a building torn down after 50 years, and the lumber and other materials used to build it sent to the landfill when they could last another 50-100 years (the old first-growth trees that were logged 50 years ago were much tighter-grained and stronger than our planted forests today), is heartbreaking and disrespectful to the hard-working human beings that handled the tree from when it was cut down to its installation in the building, not to mention disrespectful to the life of the tree and the forest itself.

And that is why I am so proud of my family’s business and happy to be working here with my dad and the rest of the crew, and why I want to promote this whole concept. Sustainability is so human… the environment is very, very important for many reasons, but sustainability isn’t just about trees, it’s about our entire existence. It’s about respect for ourselves, our species, our communities, and everything within our lives, including the value of our work. This is the lesson I have learned growing up on a Recycled Lumber yard.

A rambling rant regarding “Sustainable Forestry?”

We need ten times the old growth stands we presently have because big forests are carbon sinks, taking carbon dioxide and producing oxygen and of course we are blowing carbon in the air at a deadly pace.  Forests in the Western U.S.  are suffering.  Insects, fires, air pollution are killing portions of our forests.  When houses burn up in an area that hasn’t been made firesafe, its the same as having the trees that were harvested wasted as far as lost resources.

British Columbia is still heavily clear cutting stands of Old Growth Western Red Cedar, Douglas Fir, Sitka Spruce, Pine -yes you can still get super tight old growth that has been fresh cut and the Canadians are doing some very heavy clear cuts as far as I’ve seen flying over BC.

If an area has been logged, and millions of acres of our forests have been, we need to be stewards of the land, with judicious thinning to prevent the new growth from coming back like a thicket and using up tremendous amounts of water, and we need to to allow trees to have enough room and sunlight to grow large. This allows the trees in the forest be more spread out and fire safe like our old growth forest was.

Old growth trees have thick bark, which helps make them fire resistant. Visitors to old growth areas see time after time black scars running sometimes 100 feet up a big tree from a fire that could have been hundreds of years ago, or from multiple fires over the years. In the West, the fires of recent years have often become gigantic, with flames crowning to the tops of trees and spreading up mountainsides as if propelled by a blowtorch. The brand of fire suppression of the past 50 years by the U.S.Forest Service and state firefighters is now seen as a mistake, because fire is natures way of cleaning out the underbrush, making an area park like and leaving room enough for trees to grow to large dimension.

For the past 20 years in the Western States, we have had a ‘bug epidemic’ killing trees in California. In Southern California it has come to a head. In the Angeles National Forest, the Lake Arrowhead/Big Bear area timber stands have been decimated due to the combination of at least four factors: Complete fire suppression when possible, moratorium on logging and thinning , poor air quality, drought. The weakening of the natural resistance of timber stands from lack of water, bad air and choked undergrowth has caused the death of up to 90% of the forest in parts of San Bernardino County.

Crossroads supports logging that takes into consideration the factors of the long term health of our timberlands, fire prevention and sustainable forestry. Anyone who thinks we should let nature come back totally on her own after an area has been logged needs to study what has historically happened and the devastation that can occur from lack of maintenance. It is sad to see, but once we have changed nature’s original layout, we have to do our best to help her mimic those first landscapes as the forest regenerates. If it grows back on its own random schedule, we have problems.

We are pleased to see the National Park Service in our backyard at Yosemite National Park, finally having crews thinning, piling, and burning underbrush along the Southern Yosemite Highway entrance to prevent another conflagration like the Yosemite fire that charred many thousands of acres in 1993.

For years the norm was to crush and landfill, or to burn the wood from a building, or the whole building. Even now, if a building is scheduled for demolition or even for deconstruction, Crossroads feels it is wasteful to do away with a well built structure in good condition. we have seen tremendous structures in excellent condition, taken down to make room for a big box store or parking lot. This is an insult to the resources that were used to build the building, and the people that planned, designed, and built the structure.

From our point of view, America has often failed to build on the brilliant manufacturing and labor of her past. When a building is constructed, it is the culmination of a lot of parts, pieces and processes. Did you ever think about the metals used to make brackets, bolts, door and window hardware, roofing, screws , nails, etc etc.

People scouted for areas to get suitable ore for the steel , people mined the ore, sorted out impurities, trucked ore to foundries, and processed high quality steel for all kinds of uses. Our thousands and thousands of highly skilled engineers and steel mill workers proudly made some of the best steel in the world for 100 years. Iron workers, builders and millwrights skillfully followed plans and put materials together making skyscrapers, factories, sawmills, commercial buildings, homes.

Consider how wood ended up at lumber yards and then in a home or school or courthouse for the last 150 years. Some old growth forests were two thousand years old when timber cruisers scaled and estimated yield for lumber companies, timber fallers and buckers cut the trees, before steam and diesel power, men drove teams of oxen, skidding logs out of the forest (easier said than done), when timber was close to water, logs were put in the river or lake or ocean, then chained together in line and pulled by boats to sawmills or rail stations. Otherwise logs were transported by flume, horse and mule, train, or truck to a sawmill.

Now think about the many thousands of proud sawmill workers, doing their part to make an excellent product to help build America. Before milling logs need to be debarked, broken down to cants, resawn, planed, sometimes moulded to pattern. Picture just one guy out of 300 in some sawmill in Washington or Oregon or California (there were thousands of mills in the West), say he was a planer man who set up one machine in one mill out of thousands, but imagine a guy working 40 years, honing his knowledge of wood and machinery skills to make the best product ever seen up to that time. America had the best timber and the best sawmills in the world. Carpenters, welders, millwrights, built the mills and kept the machinery running. So you have the proud people, many dedicating their entire careers to making a top quality product.

The forests of the Pacific Northwest supplied lumber for structures all over North and South America, England and some in Europe, supplied timbers and masts for shipbuilders all over the world. The point is that when we tear out a building and crunch the iron and put it on a boat to China or India, this is a mistake.

When we take a wood framed building that is still viable and crunch it and landfill or burn it (this still happens today to usable buildings, some of which could house dozens or hundreds of small businesses) it is not only an insult to the planners and architects and engineers who designed the structures, all the workers who manufactured the materials, the railroad workers, tugboat crews and the truck drivers who transported the goods ,and the builders and laborers who toiled to make the best possible and longest lasting structure they could, it is also an insult to mother nature and our once bountiful natural resources that this great land has provided us.

Americans have wasted a lot of our resources not by using them, but by squandering them and also by squandering much of our past labor by wrecking usable structures.

It is insane to take a sound warehouse and tear it down to build a big box store that sells mostly goods manufactured in other countries. America needs to reinvent her manufacturing genious. We need to instill pride in our youth, not to teach them how to make a fast buck by investing in fluff and figuring out how to con others to believe that fluff is worth more and more and more, till the bottom falls out and the many are left broke while a few are left wealthy. We need to produce quality goods and buy our own products here at home. Part of government’s role should be to have import tariffs to offset the worlds cheap labor, and to make reasonable taxes for the small and large businesses that are making worthwhile products.

Long story short, Crossroads Recycled Lumber is proud to be saving some of our most precious natural resource, originally made from our old growth forests, and cleaning up, refurbishing and remanufacturing quality products for reuse by people like you who appreciate Americas heritage, natural resources, and the beauty strength and quality of lumber and timbers manufactured from old growth wood.

At last Marc Mandel is going to enter the discussion on saving the planet with a wider potential audience, the world wide web. He’s been running Crossroads Recycled Lumber for many years and has a unique and varied open minded outlook on this earth where we live and how we have to save it so we can continue to live here.

Kick around and read. At the very least you’ll learn something. Read more about Marc’s blog here…