🌐 Millions of Urban Trees Are Discarded—Cambium Builds Them a New Supply Chain

Adoption Archetype: ♻️ Circular Advantage
Make it profitable

Cities lose tens of millions of trees every year to decay, disease, disaster, and development. Only a small fraction are recovered. The rest—chipped, burned, or buried—release the carbon they’ve stored for decades.

The scale is staggering. Urban wood waste may be one of the largest untracked emission sources in America. If every recoverable tree were salvaged, it could replace nearly half of the country’s virgin timber demand.

“Every chipped tree is wasted carbon and wasted value,” said Ben Christensen, Cambium’s co-founder and CEO. “You look at how much wood is being wasted, and you realize there’s a trillion-dollar market still running like it’s 1950.”

Cambium is building the first digital supply chain for fallen trees—turning waste into wood products, revenue, and retained carbon.

The Spark

Ben and his team launched Cambium in 2019 while studying at Yale’s School of Forestry. They won a small grant from The Nature Conservancy to explore urban wood reuse and expected a handful of cities to participate.

Instead, 36 cities reached out. Nearly every major metro wanted help.

“Having so many cities say, this is a massive problem for us—and admit they didn’t know how to solve it—was the moment we realized how big the opportunity really was.”

The response exposed a systemic breakdown: millions of usable trees, no unified recovery network. So Cambium started building one.

Plan Before the Tree Falls

“If you try to intervene when the arborist already has the tree on the ground, it doesn’t work,” Ben said.

Circularity only works when it’s planned upstream. Cambium learned early that coordination must begin before removal—aligning supply and demand in real time.

Today, that approach guides how Cambium works with cities, FEMA, and state agencies in storm-recovery zones to convert fallen timber into valuable material instead of waste.

Cambium doesn’t start at the bottom of the chain when a tree falls. It starts at the top—with buyers. Securing commitments for a million board feet over 18 months creates gravitational pull for everyone downstream.

“We don’t go to sawmills and pitch them software,” Ben said. “We go to them and say, I want to pay you for your material.”

That demand clarity keeps every player—from haulers to mills—engaged, paid, and coordinated.

Building the System

Before Cambium, the breakdowns were common. Mills were turning away good logs they couldn’t move.

“We had a lot of these mills saying, yeah, we turn down logs all the time,” Ben said. “Folks want to bring us a log so that we can reuse it, but we don’t have a place to put it. I’m not sure if we can sell it. So we’re only going to take the best of the best and stay in this niche market.”

Cambium connects arborists, truckers, sawmills, manufacturers, and major brands through a shared data and payments layer. The platform tracks every log from recovery to reuse, creating a functioning marketplace where waste once dominated.

“People like products that are easy,” Ben said. “If we can deliver a better product and a better price, the sustainable choice becomes the easy choice.”

Cambium measures success not in users onboarded but in board feet moved—the clearest sign of throughput and adoption.

Payments as Proof

“The invoice becomes climate data,” Ben said.

Each recovered tree is logged—literally and digitally—with data on species, volume, moisture, and location. When that wood is milled, sold, and delivered, every transaction is tracked.

Those payments become verifiable proof of carbon retention. Because the carbon value of each log is already quantified, the financial chain doubles as a carbon chain.

Every invoice is a timestamped, auditable record of carbon kept in use rather than released through chipping or landfill.

“We’ve made the payment flow the truth source,” Ben said. “That’s what makes our carbon accounting work in real time.”

Sustainability claims no longer rely on delayed audits or self-reporting—they’re embedded in the transaction itself.

“If you can make salvage profitable and traceable, you can build an entire industry around what we used to throw away.”

Scale and Results

Over 500 companies now collaborate through Cambium’s network across the U.S. and Canada, creating a just-in-time recovery system that turns fallen trees into market-ready lumber and finished goods.

• Millions of board feet have already been produced from recovered urban trees.

• Room & Board builds full furniture collections using Cambium’s Carbon Smart Wood.

• Cambium is also partnering with mass-timber companies to construct tall buildings made from verified salvaged material.

By building a connected supply chain for recovered wood, Cambium is transforming waste management into value creation—helping legacy industries modernize through coordination, not disruption.

Endurance and Complexity as the Advantage

“The wood economy touches every level of government and thousands of local businesses. It’s messy by definition. Our defensibility is that we’re willing to live in that mess,” says Ben.

Many startups look for neat digital problems: single-user, single-interface, clean feedback loops. Cambium goes the other way. It enters a tangle of physical processes—trees, mills, haulers, cities, contracts—and makes coordination itself their differentiator.

“The wood economy doesn’t move fast,” Ben said. “We’re building this the same way I train for an ultramarathon—one mile at a time, with process. You don’t sprint complexity.”

Cambium’s patience is its power. Scaling a climate solution that spans physical logistics, financial systems, and public infrastructure takes endurance.

“We’re not in a flash-in-the-pan startup race,” Ben said. “We’re building the next generation of American wood products—rooted in reuse, powered by data.”

Supercool Takeaway

Cambium turns an untapped urban waste stream into a connected, profitable supply chain—building the foundation of a climate-smart material economy.

Operator Takeaways

Lead with demand. Anchor buyers create gravitational pull. Everyone else aligns around clear, guaranteed volume.

Build proof into the product. Payments track material flow and carbon in real time. Proof happens automatically.

Know the whole supply chain. Mastery comes from understanding every step and making it move as one.

Play the long game. Process compounds. Endurance becomes advantage.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

Millions of Urban Trees Are Discarded—Cambium Builds Them a New Supply Chain

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all other platforms.

↓

Stat of the Week: 36 Million

The number of urban trees that come down across U.S. cities each year—lost to the 4Ds: decay, disease, disaster, and development. First identified by the U.S. Forest Service in 2018, it’s one of the country’s largest untracked carbon sources.

Quote of the Week:

↓

Where Do Supercool Companies Come From?

Climate Deep Tech takes center stage at HackSummit, Dec 10–11 at Newlab, NYC, bringing together 500 founders, funders, and industry leaders. 

Together we’ll explore abundance with open, sometimes heated conversations on topics including on‑shore manufacturing, scaled clean energy, post‑industrial food systems and climate adaptation. 

Joined by Founders and Investors at Andreessen Horowitz, Brimstone, Crux, DCVC, Discipulus Ventures, Durin, Earth AI, Hertha Metals, Endolith, Rainmaker, Voyager Ventures, SOSV and many more. Use code SUPERCOOL to save 15% on your pass.

↓

Related

The Next Material Economy: Where Carbon Becomes the Competitive Edge.

A new material economy is taking shape—built from the waste, residue, and renewable resources that once sat outside mainstream manufacturing. Companies are rebuilding the material base of modern life to reverse the old industrial flow—using regenerative inputs instead of extraction and locking carbon into products instead of releasing it.

Plantd, the company I co-founded, builds structural panels from perennial grass that grows ten times faster than trees. Its supply agreement with D.R. Horton, the nation’s largest homebuilder, for 10 million structural panels, shows what happens when renewable biology meets commercial discipline.

EcoCocon manufactures prefabricated wall systems from straw, delivering airtight, high-performance buildings across Europe. Its expansion into North America signals how natural materials can meet code and cost at the same time.

UBQ Materials turns unsorted household waste into thermoplastic used by Mercedes-Benz, McDonald’s, and PepsiCo. Its commercial plant in the Netherlands processes over 100,000 tons of waste a year — a full circular loop already running.

CarbonCure injects captured CO₂ into concrete, where it mineralizes and strengthens the mix. The technology operates in more than 800 plants across 30 countries, turning one of the world’s highest-emission materials into a carbon sink.

Hempitecture produces bio-based insulation from American-grown hemp. Its U.S. factory is proving that natural fibers can outperform synthetics on performance and carbon without importing a single bale.

Modern Mill uses upcycled rice hulls to make durable, weather-resistant siding and decking. Its Mississippi facility shows what regional manufacturing looks like when circular inputs become competitive materials.

Econyl regenerates discarded nylon — from fishing nets to carpet fibers — through a chemical recycling process that rebuilds the material at a molecular level. More than 1,900 brands already use it, proof that circular chemistry scales when quality meets demand.

Each of these companies is rebuilding manufacturing around regenerative inputs—waste, residue, and renewable materials that store carbon and strengthen local industry. Together, they show how climate performance and product performance align and scale.

↓

Where Supercool traveled this week:

Podcasts:

🌐 Team Wildfire: You can get rich fighting climate change with Josh Dorfman

🌐 Dividend Stockpile: Companies saving the planet—and paying dividends too, with Josh Dorfman

↓

Interested in Advertising with Supercool?

Connect with future-forward decision-makers seeking next-gen climate innovations. Reach out to discuss how Supercool’s platform can help. Just hit reply to this email.

↓

Not yet subscribed to Supercool?

Click the button below for weekly updates on real-world climate solutions that cut carbon, boost the bottom line, and improve modern life.

🌐