Urban Hardwoods: Saving Forests One Tree At A Time
by on 02.25.05
If you live in the suburbs, or even the city, you know that in any good sized settlement of people, trees are cut down every year. Big trees. Some of them are diseased, some are too big to be safe, and others are just in the way of new housing. The sad fact is that most of this amazing old lumber ends up as playground woodchips, incinerated as trash or rotting in a landfill. Then, we cut down additional trees in tree farms and forests to fill our need for furniture-grade wood. But a few tree-hugging (almost literally) designers from Washington State are turning that trend around...
Urban Hardwoods, a furniture shop in Seattle, have contacts in the tree-removal business who tip them off when a nice piece of lumber is going to be removed. When that happens, they move in, carefully remove the wood in as large of pieces as possible, mill it, and dry it as you would any timber. After it's been cured for as much as a year, they turn it into some really cool pieces of production and custom furniture. The pieces have a great weight to them, reminiscent of George Nakashima's natural edged tables. The designer behind Urban Hardwoods is John Wells. In addition to using all reclaimed wood, only natural wax finishes are used, with a torching effect applied sometimes to darken the wood.
:: Urban Hardwoods Furniture at 1 Earth Design [by DM]
Sloop stools and Dining Table
Sloop stools are made of solid Douglas Fir
Kidney Ocassional Table
Detail of torched and waxed finish on Kidney Table
My company consumes 17 760 reams of paper. To me this is lot of paper and we want to embark on paper consumption reduction campaign. The use of statistics will help us make our staff more aware of the damage to the environment this maybe causing. How much in terms of trees or forests would our consumption translate to?