#HTE

Where to Get Sustainably-Sourced Wood in NYC: RE-CO BKLYN

When you picture New York City you probably don’t envision greenery, but in fact the city has some 5.2 million trees in parks, lining streets and in people’s yards in the outerboroughs. Each year, as in nature, a number of them become damaged by storms or age and must be felled.

Because there has been no direct link between the Parks Department and furniture makers in need of the stuff, all of that potentially-usable lumber gets chainsawed up and thrown into a woodchipper.

Enter RE-CO BKLYN, which now serves as that link. “We work with local arborists, tree services and city parks departments to locate downed trees and trees slated for removal locally,” the company writes. RE-CO trucks out to the site, lightens the removalist’s load by selecting suitable trees, then hauls their bounty back to their facilities, where they slab the trees and kiln-dry them to a moisture content of 6-8%, which is what furniture makers are looking for.

I call it a win-win-win-win: The removalists save time and money by having less material to process and haul to the landfill; the tree didn’t go down in vain; RE-CO employs people and stays in business; and local furniture makers get to purchase local wood at lower prices than if it had been shipped in from faraway forests.

Another neat thing about RE-CO’s operation is that they know exactly where each tree came from, and they make everything including pricing transparent. When you go to their website, it states each each slab’s origin. They photograph each slab, cite its overall dimensions, list the board footage, board-foot price and overall price per slab. Furthermore you can of course search by species. It makes it very easy to peruse their entire collection and drill down to what you’re looking for.

Their detailed cataloguing is very well-thought-out, in contrast to the websites of NYC’s two big lumber suppliers, Rosensweig and Adriatic, whose websites are clunky, outdated and do not present the information in a way that’s easy to assimilate. RE-CO’s website is designed as if they really considered what a person looking to buy wood needs to see.

The reason why RE-CO “gets it” and the others don’t is probably because RE-CO was started by a group of designer/builders, and hence know exactly how inventory ought be presented to potential buyers. You can see some of their work here, and 360 Woodworking (which sadly appears to have gone bust) has a two-part podcast interview with RE-CO co-founder Roger Benton that you can still access here. Benton’s got some great stories about how the company started and some of the challenges they’ve faced, and it’s well worth a listen.