Danny Torres, a former Forest Service firefighter who co-founded an urban lumber salvage and furniture business, explains how his team rescues city trees headed for the landfill and mills them into furniture that keeps their stored carbon locked up. He also covers the triple-bottom-line model behind the company, grant-funded tree planting and school donations, and why imperfect woods like eucalyptus deserve a second look.
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Danny Torres: We started in 2015. I used to work for the Forest Service as a firefighter. I had gotten an interest in chainsaws because that's what I was doing, and I had some lumber, but I didn't really know what to do with this lumber. I ended up meeting somebody who who was like, hey, you have this lumber. This is awesome.
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Danny Torres: Like, I can make some we can make furniture. And so that conversation turned into a group of us getting together. One does the woodworking, Mitch. He takes care of all the woodworking aspect. Peppa does all of the design, like computer designs and works with clients in those senses, and also does all the metal work. And then I do all the lumber sourcing, administrate the company, and then work on all of our partnership.
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Danny Torres: So we all have kind of like our little specific niche within, but it's all about taking city trees that would have otherwise ended in the landfill, capturing those trees and giving them an opportunity to become something else. Ultimately, the cool thing about it is to be able to see something all the way through from log to finished process.
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Danny Torres: So we're able to connect with the client and let them know specifically, like where did their tree come from? Why did it come down? But we're also doing grant work which is highly focused on education, outreach, tree planting, donating lumber to schools. We have a bunch of partnerships with like Urban Wood Network and different partners, and we're looking to try to essentially grow the capacity of urban lumber.
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Danny Torres: Pepe, with his architecture background. He's able to, number one, recreate a space, and we can create a space digitally. Right. And then the piece of furniture can also be designed digitally. And so not only does that give the ability for clients to sit with us and we can change things in live time, but also they can actually see a rendering of something that's going to get done before they commit to it, or every piece of furniture that's made.
00:01:43:22 - 00:02:06:15
Danny Torres: We do a percentage of the sale goes to planting trees. It's a partnership with American Forest, which is the oldest standing nonprofit that's focused on reforestation. Most businesses operate on a single bottom line, which is profit. Essentially, we operate on triple bottom line, which is people planet profit, right? Profit is almost like the last thing for us, because if you take care of people and you solve a big enough need, the profit comes automatically.
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Danny Torres: We were working with American Forest, right, to donate trees in different parts of the nation, but then we started thinking like we got to be involved here locally in our city. And so we wrote a large grant, a three quarter of $1 million project that we were awarded in conjunction with a nonprofit environmental center in San Luis Obispo.
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Danny Torres: And so the difference is that these trees will be climate appropriate, right? So they're like, considering that we're moving, not only have we been into a drought, but the climate is changing. The second consideration would be species, right. We oftentimes don't plant thinking about end of life. So we're never taking out trees to produce lumber. But what we're doing is that we're making sure that the right trees are there.
00:02:43:19 - 00:03:00:08
Danny Torres: So when they have to come out at the end of the lifecycle, they're going to make confirmed. We want it to showcase two different lines of furniture. So if you notice there on one side of the atrium duet, there's live edge and the style, it's predominantly a live edge style. On the other side, it's more like nonlife edge furniture.
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Danny Torres: We want it pieces that would be striking. It's impressive when you walk in there and you see the dressers, you see the headboards. They all have a story like for example, some of it is American Elm. And so there's Dutch elm disease, that redwood table. The reason that redwoods end up coming down is because they require a large amount of water to stay alive, and unfortunately, the drought plays into that.
00:03:21:13 - 00:03:42:24
Danny Torres: And then they have to come down. We used some woods that weren't as traditional, like red gum, eucalyptus. Eucalyptus has a terrible reputation and we need to figure out something to do with this lumber. Right. And red gum eucalyptus and blue gum eucalyptus, they're hardly used because again, it has a bad rap. But that's not the kind of eucalyptus that is the one that people are talking about.
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Danny Torres: And then showcasing lumber that is quote unquote imperfect, perfect straight grain, no knots. You know, this kind of clear lumber gets away from celebrating the natural way that a tree is. So if you notice on all of our furnishings, some of it has resin, right. Because there were natural cracks or bugs, the beds they have cavities within. And so that's celebrating nature.
00:04:05:22 - 00:04:21:02
Danny Torres: So that cookie it does have an interesting story. So we had just gone to grab the lumber and we were unloading it. And unfortunately that one piece rolled off the trailer. And when it hit the ground it split into two. We always knew that we could, you know, piece it together with resin, but it just didn't look good.
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Danny Torres: So then what was done was it was cracked in two other places. That way we can use it as part of the design. And that's what urban lumber lends itself to. If you had a perfect peace with perfect grain and this and that, something happens to it, you have less leeway. I've been partnered with US West Coast arborist for a while, so we created partnerships with them through a certain conferences and events that we went to.
00:04:41:19 - 00:04:58:05
Danny Torres: And then, you know, sharing information back and forth and doing business back and forth. Half of the lumber was donated from them. And sometimes we'll go down there. And if we don't have the lumber that a client is looking for for a particular job, we have partners that do what we do. And so where are we going to go get the lumber?
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Danny Torres: We want to get it from one of our partners. And so West Coast arborist is one of our partners. Sometimes we get lumber from them. It's like it's tied to planting trees and it's also tied to sequestering carbon. People understand that trees have some form of filtering or carbon dioxide goes in, oxygen goes out. But what they don't know is that that carbon dioxide actually stays in the lumber.
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Danny Torres: So like the mass of the tree, I think 52% of the weight of a tree is stored carbon. So as it essentially filters this carbon through the lifetime, it's not like it, it disappears. It then becomes the mass of the tree. And so when these things end up in landfills or on a field decomposing over time, all of the stored carbon goes right back into the environment.
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Danny Torres: We're lowering emissions by creating furniture that's made with salvaged lumber, because we're storing the carbon for a longer period of time. The resin that we use is novo. See, the finishes that we use are plant based. So it's plants in oil that make it. If we're all working separate, then we're working against each other. I look at it as the more information we share as a whole, the better we make our product, the better we make our products.
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Danny Torres: The quicker gets accepted in the market. The more people that buy it, the more business we all do, right? So the rising tide raises all ships is the most important. You don't have to be an enormous conglomerate to make a change. Think globally, act locally, that kind of thing. You can make an impact and seek to make an impact.
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Danny Torres: And don't worry, you're not going to be able to help every cause out there. It's unfortunate. And if you start focusing on every cost, you'll go crazy. We've picked the cause that we know we can champion, and we're going to do the best we can. I think of it as like the planets in trouble, right? But it's like we're part of the people that are here to save.