The start-up Cambium has acquired the Forward Forestry network of arborists, in a bid to keep more fallen trees out of landfill and in the timber supply chain.
Cambium will add the network of more than 80 arborists to its sustainable supply chain software to help boost production of its sustainable wood brand, carbon smart wood.
Typically, trees that fall due to decay, disaster, disease, or development are captured by arborists and sent to the landfill or turned into wood chips.
Forward Forestry has been an industry leader in educating arborists to sell fallen trees to sawmills where they can be turned into sustainable building materials to help contractors, furniture suppliers, and corporations meet demands to decarbonize the built environment.
In an interview, the chief executive and co-founder of Cambium, Ben Christensen said it is important to use trees that have fallen down, because it helps keep other trees alive and in local forests.
Christensen said his formative years were spent helping his carpenter father, with a chainsaw in his hand and that is where he began to understand the potential for salvaged and recycled wood.
He told me carbon smart wood comes from a number of places including diseased trees, hazard removals, fire mitigation work, storm-damaged trees, or clearing for new building development.
He added it was also important to ensure it does not end up being shipped to another corner of the globe for processing.
“A lot of these materials are just mulched, burned or sent to landfill, which is not really a climate efficient use of these resources,” said Christensen. “Plus, it costs municipalities a lot of money to manage and move wood waste.”
“There’s around 35 billion board feet of potential timber we could be reclaiming just from salvage in the United States,” he told me.
“If you look at other materials, we end up recycling between 90 and 95% of steel in America, but for wood it’s only between five and 10%. There is a huge opportunity to connect the dots here in a much bigger way.
“To date, we’ve diverted about 6.7 million board feet of wood waste back into the supply chain and sequestered just under 8,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide, but there’s plenty of room to grow and make it become an even bigger climate solution.”
“Our acquisition of Forward Forestry and its Mill Market platform allows us to expand our tech capabilities up the value chain, allowing us to divert more material from tree care waste streams into our supplier network,” he added.
“We see a huge opportunity to unlock value and resource recovery by increasing connectivity between arborists and sawmills.”
Forward Forestry’s operations will be fully integrated into the Cambium ecosystem, and all three founders will stay with Cambium and step into new roles.
Ryan Glossop, a former developer at Intel, and Yuval Levy, a software developer specializing in UI design, will come on as senior software engineers.
Mike Preminger, a forester and ISA-certified arborist, will be Cambium’s new director of business development for supply.
“This acquisition allows Cambium to significantly enhance their supply of carbon smart wood as there are growing demands to find new ways to decarbonize the world we live in,” said Adrian Fenty of MaC Venture Capital, an investor in Cambium in a statement.
“We’re proud to support Cambium in this big step towards bringing innovation and transparency to the $200B lumber industry,”
