By Sandor Slomovits
Ann Arbor loses about 600 trees every year due to age, blight, storm damage, or to make room for new construction. The city chips and disposes of those trees, which means the carbon stored in them (wood is 50% carbon by weight) is released into the atmosphere, adding to the rising CO2 levels that are causing climate change.
Paul Hickman is one of a number of individuals and companies nationwide, who have a better idea—actually a number of better ideas—about ways to put those 600 trees, and the many thousands more every year throughout the US, to better uses and to sequester their carbon. Hickman is founder of Urban Ashes, a local company that, since 2009, has been using salvaged wood to produce furniture and picture frames, and has done it primarily by employing formerly incarcerated people, a frequently marginalized population.
First, a definition: “The term ‘urban wood’ is a bit of a misnomer,” says Hickman. “People think that it’s either deconstructed wood from urban buildings or trees from urban environments. It actually refers to any tree that comes down for any reason other than its wood value. It can be urban, suburban, or rural; street trees, yard trees, storm damaged trees, and blight-stricken trees like the ones devastated by the Emerald Ash Borer. As long as we keep that [urban] wood in use that carbon continues to be sequestered. If you chip it or landfill it, which is what's typical for municipalities around the country, you're releasing that carbon back into the atmosphere. On top of that, you're cutting down trees from forests when you don't need to. If we used all the urban wood that comes down every year—not cutting down perfectly healthy city trees—but trees that come down for other reasons, if we utilized all of the high-quality wood from that, [for furniture, flooring, construction lumber] it would be about 10% of the total hardwood industry in the US. Trees in traditionally forested situations get to stand longer and, instead, we're utilizing ones that would typically be chipped or mulched. That also helps municipalities cut down on disposal fees and helps them continue to capture carbon. If we keep that wood in use, that carbon stays sequestered indefinitely. There are wood buildings in Europe that are 400 or more years old, and that carbon is still there.”
Hickman’s interest in sustainable, healthy, and planet-friendly use of resources dates back nearly three decades. “My degree is in fine art. I started painting billboards when I was 15, so I've always been kind of a maker. Later, I did all the graphics and signage for the Barbie and Disney galleries, for Mattel, big dollar stuff, all artificial, fake stuff that I couldn't relate to. But, I also had trouble working with materials that I felt were pretty horrible both for myself and for the environment. So, in the mid-nineties, I started looking for alternative materials and finishes, and ultimately discovered a whole green building movement on the West Coast, specifically in the San Francisco Bay Area. I moved there in ‘98 and pretty much submerged myself in that world.”
In 2002, after the birth of his first child, Hickman moved his family back to the Midwest and settled in Ann Arbor. It was around that time that the Emerald Ash Borer, which devastated ash trees, was identified in Southeast Michigan. Hickman was on the Board of Environmental House at Recycle Ann Arbor and, along with three others, Jason Bing, then Executive Director of that organization, Jason Haling of John’s Urban Timber, a local mill that’s still operating, and Jessica Simons, then with South East Michigan Resource Development Council, started the Urban Wood Project to make use of all those blighted trees. “Jessica in particular was the lead of the Urban Wood project” said Hickman, “which put together a network of mills in southeast Michigan, and she was also doing a lot of evangelizing about urban wood utilization around the country.”
Lumber sales increased, and the Urban Wood Project was expanding to other locations around southeast Michigan. One evening in the fall of 2008, Bing said, “We need to come up with a product that we can scale nationally for urban wood utilization, and you [Hickman] are the designer, so you need to come up with this, and it needs to be manufactured with transitional and disabled labor.” Hickman knew what disabled labor was but, “I had no idea what transitional labor was. It was a term that was used then, referring to folks coming home from prison. It sounded like a logical connection and was very intriguing to me. By April 2009, I launched Urban Ashes as a manufacturer of picture frames and furniture out of urban salvage wood with a focus on working with formerly incarcerated people and, pretty soon after that, adding in youth that had contact with the justice system. By 2012 we had grown to about 50 locations in a dozen or so states. By 2019, the year I chose to close down manufacturing, we had 250 retail partners in about 43 states.” He tried to find jobs in the businesses he’d been working with for his staff of six, and shifted his focus, “To helping to build infrastructure both on the supply side and on the market side for urban wood as well as for the labor force that we had been working with.
Part of our job is educating organizations and cities on what's available to them, and providing them the workforce development services, as well as general education, to sort of cut down the stigmas.” What is the data for their investment into hiring these folks? “It has actually much higher benefits than your average individual or somebody who hasn't come from that background.”
Ann Arbor is the pilot model that Hickman’s Urban Ashes is working on for what he calls, “a Circular Urban Wood Triconomy. It’s an economy built primarily around triple bottom line businesses. Triple bottom line businesses are ones that measure their success not only by the traditional bottom line of profit, but also by their social and environmental impact. In Hickman’s Triconomy model’s case, they are the businesses involved in every aspect of urban wood utilization, from the felling of the trees, to milling them into lumber, and to the manufacture of products for retail sales and, “All of it with a focus on the formerly incarcerated and youth that have had contact with the justice system.”
We are currently applying for a part of a national grant with an organization called Urban Salvage and Reclaimed Woods. It will help expand this model into ten to twelve new cities across the country including Detroit, Lansing, Grand Rapids, Syracuse, New York, and a number of cities in Oregon.”
For more information about Urban Ashes’ Circular UrbanWood Triconomy please visit urbanashes.wixsite.com/urbanashes-2021/general-1. For a brief video about Urban Ashes’ Circular Urban Wood Trichotomy visit https://youtu.be/xmrvZRvt-fI.
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