New Specialized Sawmill Outside Boston Taps Potential of Urban Forests - GreenBuildingAdvisor

Green Building News New Specialized Sawmill Outside Boston Taps Potential of Urban Forests Tridome Structures’ new TimberWise operation in Millis, MA, is manufacturing architectural products from local lumber sources. By Justin R. Wolf | April 7, 2026 More Green Building News Alternatives to Rare Earth Magnets Offer Great Promise The Potential to Use Waste Heat from Data Centers to Heat Homes Induction Cooktops Are Finally a Real Market Presence Getting Plastics Out of Our Buildings Urban forestry is a noble and necessary pursuit, yielding environmental and health benefits almost too numerous to count. Street trees, city parks, arboretums, and the like help with stormwater management, restore biodiversity, and mitigate the effects of urban heat islands, among other things. Urban forests, broadly speaking, also happen to be sources of large amounts of wood waste. The most recent estimates from the USDA Forest Service indicate that 46 million tons of sellable wood from urban areas is felled each year, most of which gets chipped, landfilled, or burned for energy. There is a missed opportunity afoot; not one of those pathways – with the possible exception of biomass power generation – involves making something of tangible value that’s inversely proportional to the amount of waste being generated.“The key is in matching logs and wood debris to a nearby processor who can turn that material into a value-added good,” Cambium co-founder Marisa Repka told The Arbor Day Foundation a ...