CASE STUDY No. 9619
KEY WORDS PALLETS, WOODEN, VALUE-ADDED REUSE
Big City Forest
1809 Carter Avenue
Bronx, NY 10457
Contact Resa Dimino, Environmental Affairs Advisor. Tel: 718-731-3931 Fax: 718-583-2047
Summary
Big City Forest produces flooring, furniture, and pallets from discarded wooden pallets and shipping containers. Over a 2-year period, the company has reclaimed 5.6 million board feet of lumber, conserving the equivalent of 1,163 acres of timberland and creating 100 jobs and training opportunities. By diverting 8,446 tons of pallets and crates from disposal during the same period, the Bronx company has saved local businesses $1,973,930 in disposal fees.
Action
Big City Forest (BCF) is a for-profit business subsidiary of Bronx 2000, a not-for-profit, community-based development organization. After 5 years of R&D in wood reclaiming and manufacturing by Bronx 2000, BCF was established as a for-profit corporation in May 1994. Initially it used the reclaimed wood to remanufacture only shipping pallets. In October 1995 it expanded to produce furniture and flooring on a commercial scale.
Discarded wooden packaging is an ideal source of reclaimed wood because:
BCF has developed a proprietary system for sorting, grading, drying, and remilling the discarded wood used in its remanufacturing processes. Because of the diversity in kind and condition of incoming wood, BCF is developing a variety of products for a broad range of markets. It is opening markets for its furniture in specialty "green" stores like Manhattan's Terra Verde and Earth General; in mainstream consumer products stores like Farberware's factory outlets; in contract sales to colleges, foster care agencies, and corporate offices, and in store fixtures to such national outlets as Patagonia and Ben & Jerry's ice cream shops. It has sold flooring to housing rehabbers in Brooklyn, New York, and Bowie, Maryland.
Most of the wood acquired by BCF is used to refurbish pallets and the remainder is used in flooring and furniture, including butcher-block style tables. As markets and sales develop for the value-added products, a 75%-25% division of uses is developing. Wood unsuitable for use in pallets, furniture, or flooring is ground for sale to a manufacturer of medium density fiberboard. Any remaining fiber is used to heat the BCF building, making the company a no-waste operation. In early 1996, BCF was not yet operating in the black but was expected to become profitable within 18 months.
BCF says the national recycling rate for wooden pallets, crates, and packaging is
about 10%, with the majority ground into low-value applications like fiber or chips and
more than half of the ground wood burned for fuel. BCF estimates that harvesting just the
discarded wooden packaging in big U.S. cities would conserve about 300,000 acres of virgin
timberland a year. The 88 million pallets discarded annually in the 49 largest urban areas
contain about 1.5 billion board feet of usable lumber, or roughly three times the amount
of virgin timber used to produce all the hardwood flooring sold in the U.S. every year.