In Portland, what goes up must first come down.
Every time a new building takes the place of an old one, the city requires that each building be disassembled, piece by piece, and recycled as best as possible. But according to Nathalie Hutchinson, the founder of Timber Recycling, a trove of useful, high-quality timber is wasted with every deconstruction project.
That’s the problem that Hutchinson and Timber Recycling, which will compete in the Cleantech Challenge in April, the Center for Entrepreneurship’s innovation incubator dedicated to clean technologies, are trying to solve. The team will present an idea for a timber-grading business that will also manufacture gentler timber construction materials.
In 2017, Oregon passed legislation that allowed for the grading of construction timber waste. Now, deconstruction companies and Timber Recycling can grade new sources of timber that previously was deemed unfit for reuse in construction and other projects. With proper inspection and grading, the legislation promises to minimize even further the amount of timber waste in a state that has mandated building deconstruction since the early twentieth century.
That’s when Nathalie Hutchinson saw an opening. “I saw this huge market opportunity here to take existing timber from deconstructed buildings, and then we use it because not only is the timber stronger, but there is so much of it available and most of it goes to the dump,” she said.
Hutchinson and Timber Recycling will also design and produce a construction-grade connector that will make building construction gentler for timber. “Instead of nailing together members to make a wood-framed wall, we would have these cups that we would install instead of nails,” Hutchinson said. “They can be snapped around the structural members to hold them in place. Then you can unsnap them and recycle that lumber infinitely.”
Nathalie Hutchinson, originally from Pullman, Washington, is a senior in architecture at Portland State University interested in sustainable design. She is joined by Vanessa Hammond, a second-year architecture student, whose background in civil engineering will help propel the exploration of sustainable materials.