When trees are removed from parks, roadsides and development sites, land managers often have few choices available to reuse the timber products and trees often end up being chipped. It's quick and efficient but can result in good timber going to waste.
Steve Colquitt leads the Urban Forest team at the City of Kingston, which manages more than 100,000 trees. From time to time, trees need to be removed for reasons such as safety, declining health or to make way for approved community projects. Traditionally, much of this timber has been turned into wood chips or mulch.
"Putting them all through a chipper made me a bit sad," Steve said. "I knew there had to be a better way to give some of this timber a second life, so I started looking for a company we could partner with to reuse more of our logs."
Kingston had also outgrown its small storage yard and needed somewhere with the right facilities and equipment to safely handle large and heavy logs.
Steve came across Arborcraft the way a growing number of councils and contractors do, through our Managing Director's LinkedIn feed. Sam's post about ArborReuse capacity caught his eye, and he reached out directly.
After visiting the yard (which it turned out was also based in the City of Kingston), Steve placed an order. Kingston now rents a small piece of land in the Arborcraft yard to store logs, and Arborcraft use them to mill and produce finished timber products for use in council projects.
The first project has transformed timber from Kingston Council trees into eight handcrafted log bench seats, including timber from trees removed as part of the Le Page Park masterplan redevelopment in Cheltenham. Rather than being chipped, the timber has been given a new purpose serving the community. The removed trees will also be replanted and replaced at a ratio of three new trees for every one removed once the project is complete.
The seats were needed to replace deteriorated seating at a local baseball field: original telegraph poles that had been there for more than 30 years had reached the end of their useful life.
From first enquiry to delivery: approximately six weeks.
Some of the logs were still green when milled, so Jared applied a treatment to the finished seats to slow moisture loss and reduce the risk of cracking as they dry, a natural outcome of working with real timber.
"I like the natural form," Steve says. "Jared seems to be quite artistic in his ability to see a product coming from a log that wouldn't traditionally be used for any purpose other than wood chips."
The eight seats produced from Kingston's reused logs are heading to a community baseball field. Steve is hopeful the new seats will last at least another 30 years but time will tell.
Key outcomes:
Other reuse opportunities are also being explored, including seats, picnic tables and other nature-based play features for local playgrounds.
This is what the ArborReuse model looks like in practice: not a one-off job, but a growing pipeline from tree removal to community use.