Urban wood from city removals: what Forest Service sources report

This page reports what the named publications say. It is not training and does not teach the work.

How much wood the cities produce

Utilizing Municipal Trees: Ideas From Across the Country, by S.M. Bratkovich, is hosted by Urban Forestry South, a project of Southern Regional Extension Forestry and the USDA Forest Service. Its summary says that over 200 million cubic yards of urban tree and landscape residue are generated in the United States every year, and that 15 percent of this is classified as unchipped logs. It says that if those logs were sawn into boards they would theoretically produce 3.8 billion board feet of lumber, nearly 30 percent of the hardwood lumber produced annually in the country.

These are dated figures. The Urban Forestry South page prints a publication date of 2006, and the summary quotes them with two footnotes that the page does not reproduce, so the original basis cannot be checked from the page. They are an estimate from the year printed, not a count for any other year.

Why the trees come down, and what it costs

The same summary lists storm blowdowns, natural mortality, severe insect and disease damage and construction as reasons for removal. It names rising labor and transportation costs, higher landfill or tipping fees and lost opportunity costs as the financial burden on municipal tree programs, and says tree disposal in landfills has been outlawed or reduced in many States. It lists the products it has in mind: sawlogs for furniture, cabinets and flooring, pulpwood, fuelwood, wood chips for mulch, and burls and branch crotches for woodworking. It describes 16 case studies sorted by participant type: state and regional partnerships, municipalities, tree service firms, entrepreneurs and sawmills.

What the 2021 roundtable says

Urban wood roundtable, by Morgan Grove and ten co-authors, appeared in City Trees, the journal of the Society of Municipal Arborists (September and October 2021, pages 14 to 18). The Forest Service's Treesearch record lists it as informally refereed and from the Northern Research Station. Its points:

Urban trees are not removed for their wood value but for storm damage, safety, insects and disease and similar reasons, yet how the tree is removed changes the options and the value of the wood.
Demand for urban wood is high in cities across the country, but lack of consistent supply is a key obstacle to high-volume use.
The authors describe an urban wood chain: those who own and manage urban trees, those who process the wood, those who specify its use, and the consumers. They call a linear chain an oversimplification.
For public agencies and private arborists, the article says to record trees by species, size and condition, and to track the wood on hand. Its example is a company needing 20,000 board feet of white oak, or a city agency needing 1,000 cubic yards of wood chips.
It contrasts a wood dump with a sort yard, where logs, branches and chips are kept apart, ideally with logs sorted by species, size and quality, and separate areas for firewood, chips, compost and mulch.

Who is using it, as the article reports

The article says a furniture retailer began using urban wood through the Baltimore Wood Project, and has since used wood from Baltimore, Detroit, Minneapolis, Sacramento and Southern California. It lists availability, scale, appropriate species and pricing as obstacles for the retail furniture industry. It says a guitar maker released a guitar line in 2020 and 2021 with backs and sides of Shamel ash (Fraxinus uhdei) from former Los Angeles County street trees, supplied by West Coast Arborists, Inc., and that before this there was no cost-effective way to get the wood to the factory in the quality, quantity and predictability needed. It also says small woodshops have long obtained urban wood through informal networks, and that the vast majority of good wood is disposed of before anyone knows it was there.

The authors write that these are their own views and do not necessarily represent the views of the USDA or the Forest Service.

Where the two sources differ

The 2006 summary treats urban wood mainly as a disposal-cost and sawlog question and gives volume figures. The 2021 article gives no volume figures; it concentrates on supply chain, record-keeping and markets. Neither source gives a price per board foot or a payment to a tree owner for logs, so this page gives none.