There’s treasure in those trees destined for the chipper

Family company reclaims fine pieces of wood from Toronto's urban forestry department.

Thestar.com
Oct. 26, 2015
By Verity Stevenson

Away from the neatly stacked tree slabs at the foot of Sid Gendron’s sawmill lies an oddly shaped sliced trunk.

To Gendron, this one’s special.

“There’s a really nice collaboration of Mother Nature and that piece of wood,” he said. The piece of maple wouldn’t fit in the piles because of two burls sticking out of it. “Can you envision being on the other side of that? You’re serving us a drink, that’s your bar and this is your seated area,” Gendron said with a hint of excitement.

“Something like this, most people would have just cut up. It would have been firewood,” because “if I make one more cut, it would be just too weak, right,” explains Gendron.

Technically, it wouldn’t have sat in someone’s firewood pile, but could have in someone’s garden as mulch. Had Gendron and his team not picked it out in Etobicoke’s Centennial Park days earlier, it would have gone through the chipper - the city’s main method of disposing of trees.

That’s what Gendron’s business, Sawmill Sid, does. It picks high-quality chunks of wood out of city yards, pays $1 to $4 per metric ton, saws them into one- to six-inch slabs (or custom-sized) and sells them to furniture makers across the city and the region.

To encourage that process and others like it, city council approved a two-year pilot project called the Green Market Acceleration Program on Sept. 30. The program will encourage “local businesses in the green economy.”

Through another green initiative, this time with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, Sawmill Sid may soon be able to use land loaned by the TRCA to eventually share profits with it, according to Gendron’s wife and business partner, Sheila.

The city’s economic development council reached out to the company after it was hired last summer to cut through Leslieville’s Maple Leaf Forever tree, toppled in a July 2013 windstorm, to inform them of the possibility of bidding for access to city yards.

As a throng of officials, onlookers and a brass band watched, Gendron went in for the first cut, meant to be turned into a bench. “The way the artisan wanted that piece of wood, it was going to be really close,” the sawyer said, touching his thumb to his index finger. “We were like a credit card from either making the cut or being very embarrassed.”

The contract was a catalyst for business - and it showed Gendron all that could be done with just one uneven tree. Each slab was a feat because of the tree’s shape, but they helped turn it into 150 projects and 4,025 individual items, detailed in another report passed at a recent city council meeting.

The cuts’ success indicated to the couple that they had been onto something.

For the 15 years before that, their project had been a side gig, started when the couple’s house in Simcoe County caught fire and their insurance company wouldn’t cover the damage.

Sheila Gendron bought a portable sawmill and the two set out to rebuild their home, using old road signs in place of plywood and milled reclaimed wood for their floors, doors and ceiling beams.

“We had no money,” Sheila Gendron said. “We learned how to repurpose things.” And so began a family’s cross-regional trips from Tiny Township to the big city, sawmill in tow.

On a Wednesday in September, their two portable sawmills buzzed on an empty lot in Mississauga, where Sawmill Sid had been given access to 200-year-old tree stumps collected from Centennial Park in Etobicoke.

“We’re trying to show people the tree doesn’t have to go in a chipper,” said Richard Ruminski, a furniture-maker standing nearby who consults on projects that make use of salvaged trees, like the Gendrons’.

It’s not the most efficient way to rid the city of its trees for now. The city has contracts with companies that turn the trunks to mulch in a process that has been streamlined and is already better than just throwing the wood away.

So, it’s been a little tough to sell the idea to the Urban Forestry department, said the senior officer of the Green Economy unit at Toronto’s economic development office.

“It’s a lot easier to toss something out than to just recycle it,” Rob McMonagle said, explaining that the two offices had diverging mandates - one to dispose of trees efficiently, and the other to encourage small business and green initiatives.

And though Urban Forestry has agreed to the collaboration, it still has to hire the wood chipper for the trees the salvagers can’t take.

“They’re seeing their volume go down, so they’re going to try to get in as often as possible,” McMonagle said of the grinders, who are paid according to weight.

“If we could just get access to the high-value trees, then they could have 80, 90 per cent of them,” Ruminski said.

Sometimes, that’s an odd-shaped tree like Maple Leaf Forever, and other times, it’s one with two burls in it that’d make a nice bar or coffee table.