When life gives a downed tree, make lumber

Stack of logs from a cedar tree on a sunny day — A downed cedar tree processed into sawlog length. PHOTO: JENNIFER DANN

By Jennifer Dann

FOLLOWING THE FIERCE windstorms of last winter, many Maine neighborhoods were left with a big tree mess to clean up. Losing a tree in a yard or a community space is a loss of many benefits, including shade, stormwater management and a sense of home and peace. Adding to those losses, the standard removal method of cutting trees into small pieces for chipping and landfilling results in an accelerated release of stored carbon into the atmosphere. Changing our perception of downed trees from waste to usable wood can help.

What is urban wood?

The USDA Forest Service estimates that 46 million tons of merchantable wood fall in U.S. towns and cities annually. This wood is called “urban wood” and there’s a national effort to make better use of it. It isn’t an easy endeavor to get urban wood into local wood markets: The costs of transportation and processing can be prohibitively expensive at this smaller and geographically scattered scale.

However, Maine is well poised to utilize urban wood. We have industrious and creative people who have an appreciation for wood and its uses, as well as an active local wood products industry that includes many smaller-scale wood processors.

How to process your downed tree

If you’re one of the many Mainers with a storm-downed tree, consider how it might be spared the landfill and better used. Start by talking with your tree care company to see if they have the equipment to safely process the tree trunk into a longer length and move it to a convenient temporary space in your yard. If so, evaluate whether the tree could be turned into lumber. Good species for lumber include oak, maple, ash, white pine, cedar and hemlock. As a rough size guide, the tree should be at least 8 feet long with a diameter of 10 inches or more at the small end of that length. It needs to be free of rot, straight and have a minimum number of large knots.

If you jump those hurdles, you’ll need to find someone with a sawmill who can process the log into lumber. Portable sawmills can handle smaller custom jobs, ranging in size and production level from large hydraulically driven bandsaws to chain saws mounted on a guide. Depending on the size of the sawmill and the number of logs you have, the sawmill may ask that the logs be delivered to them, instead of the sawmill coming to your location. You can find a listing of custom sawmills in the Maine Wood Guide at localwoodworks.org, but many smaller portable sawmills work on word of mouth. Your tree care company, town office or local foresters may have leads. Depending on the lumber’s planned end use, drying and planing may be needed.

If the tree is not lumber quality, it could be turned into woodcraft, fence posts, rustic furniture, or other uses. Firewood is another possibility. If you don’t use firewood yourself, there are firewood banks across the state that connect people in need with extra firewood. Finally, your town or someplace nearby may accept woodchips for use as biomass or mulch.

As an individual homeowner, the cost of transporting and processing single trees may simply prove too much. However, communities across the country are working to create urban wood hubs where trees are collected for more efficient processing. Consider working within your community to explore this long-term solution.

Whatever the outcome of your downed tree, try to plant one or more replacement trees. While that can be hard to think about if you’ve just dealt with an expensive tree removal, neighborhood trees play a vital role in climate change mitigation.

As we face a prediction of climate change causing more frequent and strong storms in Maine, we can help break the negative cycle by finding uses for urban wood that store carbon and by growing the next generation of neighborhood trees.