Tom Hamilton: Lumber Cycle

“I think in order to understand how urban forestry can be successful, I think it's really important for people in the community to see what the process is like to get from a tree to lumber.”

Tom Hamilton

Welcome back to a brand new episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast. Today your host Steve Larosiliere sits down with Tom Hamilton from Lumbercycle in San Diego. Steve and Tom just recently hosted a Woodpreneur meet up at Tom’s shop in National City, which allowed so many familiar and new faces to get a chance to meet up, network, and share ideas!

“We do things a little bit differently from most sawmills because we are a 501C3 non-profit. We started back in 2016 down here in San Diego and we have a community college called Palomar College, which has one of the greatest woodworking programs in the nation. You can learn to make literally anything you want there and they have so much community and staff that's ready to help you with any project you want to do.

They also have a sawmill urban forestry program, where they accept logs, and they'll cut and dry the wood and then sell it to their students for a super crazy discount. After I volunteered with them for a couple of years, when I was getting out of the program, I wanted to try and continue the mission that they were doing by salvaging logs and finding ways to affect people's lives with it by making the logs affordable and accessible for as many people as possible. I want to try and do that for the public.

In San Diego, trying to find urban wood in this area, it is really expensive stuff because there's not a lot of people that are doing it. I know the goal is to try and save as many trees from going into landfill as possible, but it seemed like it would make more sense to save more trees if we could do more volume. And by doing more volume, you can lower your costs, and if you can make it accessible and affordable for low income and disadvantaged communities, then you can try and make that more systemic organic movement on the working man's level to make long term changes for urban forestry sustainability.”