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

Green Building News

Tridome Structures’ new TimberWise operation in Millis, Mass., is manufacturing architectural products from local lumber sources.

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 few years back.

The theoretical value-add has always been there; processors, however, have been hard to come by. Tridome Structures, a Massachusetts-based manufacturer of mass timber products, saw the gap in the Northeast market and acted accordingly. Only six months ago, the company opened a subsidiary mill operation called TimberWise in the town of Millis, a Boston suburb, that sources and mills wood from nearby urban forests.

TimberWise is no ordinary mill. And unlike similar startups, in the Northeast region or elsewhere, Tridome isn’t retrofitting an aging sawmill for 21st-century production. A retrofit of an existing mill does apply in this case, but the 50,000-square-foot Millis plant that Tridome acquired is in fact younger than the very company that now owns it.

Building a state-of-the-art mill

Since Tridome’s founding in 2019, the company has been steadily producing engineered timber products…