Storm Trees combats climate change by turning downed trees into lumber

The Storm Trees business in Eden Prairie is using trees to combat climate change – by chopping them into wood. 

Wood, the company explains on its website, is a natural carbon sequestration vehicle: it stores carbon and carbon dioxide rather than releasing them into the atmosphere. And, says founder Andy McLean, there’s a lot of wood available, partly due to factors related to climate change.

“We don’t cut any trees down,” McLean said. Instead, they get them from sources like municipalities or tree services that are already taking down trees. Reasons those trees might be coming down include insects like the emerald ash borer, diseases like oak wilt, or storm damage.

“The confluence of all these events, climate change, the works: trees are coming down,” McLean said. 

Previously, in Minnesota, a large percentage of the mulch these trees were turned into was purchased by biofuel companies, McLean said. A shift in subsidies to favor solar energy changed the market, and “The mulch has no home,” he said. “So we started realizing that there was an almost infinite supply and that if we could just insert ourselves between the standing tree and the mulch pile, there was an opportunity.”

That realization came, in part, from McLean’s personal experience. He’s enjoyed making things out of wood in his garage for a few years, and “Along the way, I realized that wood is really expensive.” So, when a white oak tree fell down in a park across the street from his Minnetonka home due to a storm, “I’m looking at this thing, and I’m like, ‘There’s a lot of lumber in there.’” 

He started using an electric chainsaw to take boards off the tree, in spurts between conference calls and other tasks for his previous job. At one point, he returned to the tree to find the city forester’s business card nailed to it, with the message: “Call me.” After being informed of the reasons he couldn’t do that in a city park, “He told me, ‘You really want logs? The city has massive quantities of logs that we don’t really know what to do with,’” McLean reported. 

‘Quit my job and got to work’ to divert from waste stream

What the city of Minnetonka had, McLean said, was “a pile of logs, the better part of the size of a football field, and turns out that they’re paying to get those turned into mulch – and it’s all oak, and ash, and maple and all of this high-value, high-quality material. I was like, ‘What if I told you I’d take all of it?’ I went and bought a truck trailer, skid steer, sawmill, kiln, warehouse, quit my job and got to work on trying to divert some of this stuff from the waste stream.”

Storm Trees acquired its first trees in February 2023 and cut the first boards in the spring of that year. They moved into a warehouse facility on Industrial Drive in northwest Eden Prairie in June 2023. During those intervening months, they temporarily kept the logs on a friend’s Christmas tree farm in Elk River, “which didn’t help us in terms of carbon footprint, because you’re dragging logs 30 miles up the road,” McLean said. 

Eventually, Storm Trees does want to track the carbon footprint of every board foot of lumber they produce. For instance, McLean used a live-edge table destined for an IT company in Golden Valley as an example.

“I know that this tree was taken from St. Louis Park,” McLean said. “It was seven miles from the place that it’s going to be used as a table. I know that I drove it here in a truck on a trailer. I know that it ran through a sawmill. All those things layered together can help us capture the carbon footprint as opposed to just the carbon sequestration.” 

Storm Trees is already tracking carbon sequestration data and sharing it with their sourcing partners to track carbon reduction goals and environmental impact reports. The data can get pretty granular: different wood species, which have different densities, store varying levels of carbon. 

Using ‘somebody else’s garbage’

Again using the live-edge table as an example, McLean said he and Storm Trees partner and COO Patrick Hughley will build simple projects for customers at this point, but their focus is on lumber.

“It’s time-consuming to pick up trees, mill trees, dry wood,” McLean said. “We’re talking about crazy, crazy hours just getting the wood. I’ve said that I’m like an Uber driver for logs. I’ll get a ping, ‘We’ve got a tree coming down, can you be here in, like, 30 minutes?’” 

The business gets these trees from tree services and municipalities like the cities of Minnetonka and Edina. “They’re often happy to hand over large tree trunks because, ‘A: they don’t necessarily have the home that they used to for the mulch and B: the big stuff is what breaks their equipment,'” McLean said.

Once the tree gets to the warehouse, it is cut into lumber using a sawmill. Whether that’s dimensioned lumber, cut to specific widths and depths – such as 2x4s – or live-edge slabs, which keep the original shape of the tree, depends in part on the species. For white oak, for instance, “Our prospective largest customers are looking for the dimensional lumber,” McLean said, whereas, “Everybody seems to love walnut live-edge slabs, so we’ve got some dimensional, but if it’s a good log, we’ll probably slab some of that as well.” 

After cutting, the boards are dried in a kiln down to 6 to 8% moisture content. The heat treatment cycle provides sterilization from things like insects. 

Customers for the wood right now include furniture manufacturers, cabinetmakers and craftspeople, as well as the Shakopee School District for woodshop classes. That contact came from a booth at the Minnesota Woodworkers Guild Expo at Canterbury Park. While there, McLean said, they met a lot of wood aficionados.

“One of my bigger fears as we started this whole operation was, ‘Is it going to pass the smell test?’” he said. “It’s like I’m saying, ‘I got this tree, it’s essentially been defined as somebody else’s garbage, and now you’re going to use it for your expert-level project. But thus far, it’s been really well-received.” 

Part of the appeal, Hughley said, is “(We’re) doing some good with business, and people want to see that succeed.” 

The limiting factor, McLean added, “is our ability to process and the sheer volume. If somebody opened up shop doing the exact same thing across the street, we’d be fine. There’s no shortage of desire, demand, or supply.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect the correct percentage of moisture content.