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 Walking into California Hardwood Producers office-showroom-museum, one
immediately sees a lot of wood, beautiful samples of wood flooring, molding,
lumber. A closer look reveals that this is something special; these unique
pieces are made from urban trees including oaks, walnuts, sycamores, elms,
and maples. These trees, some of them historic, have been salvaged from
landfills, logging waste piles, and parks and streets due to age, storm
damage or disease. The store has conventionally harvested wood products as
well as bamboo flooring.
No Waste Logging
In 1987, would-be retiree and CalMAX user Dave Parmenter was at the landfill
in Sacramento County dumping trash and he noticed huge logs being covered
with dirt. To a former homebuilder, cabinetmaker, and wood lover, this made
no sense. "The city and county weren’t yet being mandated to save landfill
space," noted Parmenter, "and it was easier for them to just throw away
these trees which had been removed from city streets or parks for safety
reasons."
Parmenter was also puzzled by the huge piles of hardwood logs he saw in the
national forest when hiking. These "weed trees" had been left by loggers
after they had cleared the area of pines, cedars, and other soft woods.
"They would just burn them, but you could build hundreds of houses out of
that lumber," explained Parmenter. So Parmenter, who had retired early and
was getting restless, decided to do something to make use of this valuable
resource of California hardwoods. He went to the timber companies to ask if
they would sell him the trees, and they said yes.
 His next step was to go to a local sawmill and ask if they would cut the
wood. "They just laughed at me," he chuckles, "so I bought a little sawmill
and started cutting them myself." Out of these "scrap" native hardwoods, Parmenter got more than a million board feet of lumber,
"enough for 10,000
houses." He sold the wood to people building houses in the Sierra foothills.
Some of those who bought the wood had other trees they needed to remove
before building their homes, so he would mill those as well.
Promoting Small Sawmills
In the late 1980s, the Sierra Economic Development Group partnered with the
State of California to form the California Hardwood Initiative. "This was a
time when the lumber industry was less active in some of these rural
communities and there was a lot of unemployment," explains Parmenter. "They
heard what I was doing and asked me to help them with this initiative to
promote small sawmills. The idea was to get people working harvesting all
this scrap wood left from the logging."
"The time seemed right. In this area there was an effort to start a small
sawmill cooperative. Pretty soon there were dozens of these small sawmills
being set up throughout the state. We started to get orders from the Bay
Area. One of those was for large planks that would go under ships being
pulled for dry dock painting and repairs. There were problems, however,
because not all of the sawmill operators were able to produce to the specs
required. The cooperative never materialized but many of the small sawmills
remain."
"Through this hardwood initiative, we were trying to make urban forestry a
viable business venture," explains Parmenter. "That involved getting
equipment set up to serve regional areas, so that urban logs could bill
milled without huge transportation costs. The idea was to have mills to
serve the major metropolitan districts. Getting that equipment out and
getting people with wood and mills connected was one of the things the
California Department of Forestry worked on." (See page 6 of the Insert
section.)
"We also set up training to teach how to cut, dry, and process wood,"
continued Parmenter. "There is a lot to know, starting from how to safely
take out a tree. Green trees are equal weights of wood and water, so they
are very heavy. Drying must be done in a controlled environment so that the
wood does not split. And one has to learn to spot pieces of metal; some
trees even have bullets in them. We have tried all kinds of devices to try
to figure out if there is metal in a tree, but the best way is to look at
it, you can see the marks made by the rust," explained Parmenter as he
points out darkened markings on a tree, a sign of metal.
More Trees, More Wood
In the early 1990s, Parmenter started working out of the old CalIda Lumber
company site, about 8 acres on highway 49. He also was asked by the city and
county of Sacramento to start logging those trees that had been getting
buried in the landfill. In 1993, Parmenter got a contract with the city and
county to buy the park and street trees. The funds he paid for the trees
were used to help start the Sacramento Tree Foundation, today a significant
nonprofit organization in Sacramento that plants and promotes the care of
street trees.
Farmers also provide a source of trees. Parmenter approached some and
offered to buy the wood from the trees they cut down. Most of his wood today
comes from municipally removed trees; he doesn’t often take trees from
private landowners. But small sawmill operators will come on site and mill
the wood for private landowners. "Maybe a family needs to take down an old
tree, perhaps planted generations ago," says Parmenter. "One way to keep the
memory of that tree alive is to make it into a piece of furniture the family
can enjoy in their home."
 Parmenter has gotten several historic trees from the 40-acre park
surrounding the State Capitol, currently home to 341 trees (see
www.capitolmuseum.ca.gov). One, a Cedar of Lebanon, was planted in the 1870s
and removed more than a hundred years later. Parmenter milled the tree for
someone who built a Tahoe mansion from it, including furniture. Parmenter
has saplings from the same tree growing along the west side of his Auburn
mill site. Some of the wood from these trees has also been turned into
furniture. A couple of local craftspeople who have used the wood are Brad
Greenwood (www.greenwooddesigns.net) and Robert Beauchamp,
www.robertbeauchamp.com.
Other Recycling Efforts
 Parmenter’s passion about not wasting wood carries on to other areas. He has
turned discarded semi-truck trailers into small drying kilns. Heat blows
through these small kilns using used refrigerator coils. Parmenter has a
prototype for a solar-powered kiln using small solar panels. “Every small
sawmill owner needs a small kiln. Done correctly, these can be designed to
operate very efficiently, saving fossil fuels,” notes Parmenter.
Fire, Adventures, and Helping
Today Parmenter, whose business is still recovering from a 1999 fire that
burned his entire stock and mill, continues to make wood flooring from
discarded and urban trees. He sells many types of flooring as well as other
recovered wood on e-Bay. Unfortunately, his mill is still not up to the
pre-fire production level, so Parmenter has had to supplement his business
with the sale of other flooring products.
Through the years, Parmenter has had many adventures in wood recycling. One
involved the removal of a huge building in San Francisco. "They had huge
timbers in that building and they were just going to tear them up. I asked
if I could remove the wood and they said they had to get it all out in three
days. I said I could do it and they said that would be impossible. We rented
some huge cranes and lifted the roof off, then lowered it to the ground. We
pulled off the wood and hauled it back to the mill, then it took weeks to
get all the nails out of it; that provided a lot of work for unskilled
laborers here. I ended up selling it to a company in Japan."
 Parmenter has helped many others in the wood recovery business.
"There was a
guy who made these minisubmarines that were used to find large submarines
that had been submerged. He found out about the tons of sinker logs in the
Great Lakes that had been part of the log boons when that area was logged in
the 1800s. He used these submarines to find those logs and then hauled them
up. He did not know about milling. I told him how to dry the logs correctly
and how to mill them."
Whether he is milling wood, drying it, or selling it, Parmenter takes great
pride in his work and in the many types of wood he has. "Every species of
tree can be grown in California, there are many exotic trees here. Trees are
a tremendous resource; they can reduce house temperatures by 10 percent in
our hot summers. At the end of their lives, they can be used for houses and
beautiful furniture."
Contact information:
Dave Parmenter
California Hardwood Producers
1980 Grass Valley Highway
Auburn, CA 95603
(530) 888-8191
FAX (530) 888-8199
dave@californiahardwood.com
www.californiahardwood.com
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