Urban Ashes庐, a pioneer in the urban wood industry, has partnered with the City of Ann Arbor, Michigan, to launch their first Circular UrbanWood Triconomy鈩� (CUT Model鈩�), an innovative municipal wood recycling program built upon decades of expertise. This collaboration prioritizes local economies, reduces municipal costs and landfill waste, increases carbon sequestration, develops local wood resources, and creates career and business opportunities for justice-impacted youth and formerly incarcerated individuals.
Urban Ashes creates scalable municipal wood recycling systems, to support local urban wood mills and local manufacturers. The CUT Model is a pioneering framework based on the triple bottom line鈥擯eople, Planet, and Profit鈥攖hat promotes environmental sustainability, social equity, and economic diversity by maximizing the potential of urban wood. Urban wood includes trees removed not for their wood value but due to age, disease, or storm damage, existing across urban, suburban, and rural areas.
Each year, the U.S. misses the opportunity to recover an estimated 46 million metric tons of potential urban lumber. This lost wood resource, primarily chipped, burned, or聽landfilled, could instead produce over 7 billion board feet of quality urban lumber. That equals the volume of about 16 Empire State Buildings.
This also results in lost carbon sequestration of an estimated 5.6 million tons of carbon and releases around 20.55 million tons of CO2e emissions. Capturing just 40% of this capacity could be equivalent to planting approximately 136 million trees and growing them for ten years in terms of carbon and CO2e impact. The CUT Model offers an alternative by converting these trees into quality urban wood and durable wood products, sustaining carbon sequestration and increasing their value.
For comparison, the world’s largest direct air capture plant,聽Stratos, currently under construction in Texas with a $1 billion+ investment, is projected to remove only 550,000 tons of CO2 per year鈥攗nder 7% of the urban wood industry’s potential at only 40% !
Urban Ashes is driving transformative change with its CUT Model, already in engagement across over 25 cities in the U.S. Through its partnership with Ann Arbor, Urban Ashes is setting a powerful precedent for municipal wood recycling programs staged to expand and benefit communities nationwide.