We cover so many different areas and a lots of them are interesting also for sustainable and circular economy, such as our research for ecological materials, wood and resins.
We usually don’t buy commercial wood, on the contrary we often select wild wood essences around the place we live, or thanks to the help of gardeners and farmers around Italy.
For exotic essences, we had bought and carefully recycled little wood stocks from craftsmen that were closing their business.
Our wood supply chain: people, stories and woods
Today we want to show you some places that sometimes are the backstage of our work, and tell the stories of people we meet while working with wood in our countryside.
This is an interesting issue also for the possibility that we see to work in sustainable business and circular economy in our territory.
After many years looking for wood in our hills and mountains (central Italy, between Bologna and Firenze), we can see that local and sustainable economies could grow here in the wood sector, that now appears less developed, at least in our region.
Solid wood and big trees
In the past 40 years wood craftsmen passed from working solid wood to multi-layer products that have only a little part made of wood (and often also toxic materials, such as glues and formaldehyde).
Looking for huge wood boards we had found two places, not far from the place where we live: two people that still has big saw able to cut big trees into boards.
One of them still works as gardener, especially for big trees, he travels a lot everyday in our area (province of Bologna) and brings to his workshop the trees/wood.
He has a huge professional saw machine to make boards, made in the Eighties, a huge warehouse and also a crane to move the big trees.
He is around 70 years old but he looks like a young man.
At his place (when we manage to find him, because he doesn’t use mobile phone!) we meet always different people looking for wood or interesting talks.
Here you can find so much wood, wood everywhere, of many different kinds: he says that in the last 4-5 years the market collapsed, now it is difficult to sell it, also because the construction sector has stopped too, in the last years.
The other one is an old farmer and he has an old handcrafted saw, he used the tractor to move the trees and to cut them into the machine.
Gardeners used to bring him big trees to be transformed into boards.
He is stopping the business because he is getting old, but in the last years also it was always more difficult to sell the wood and get a good price.
They both have local woods which are very good, strong and beautiful: cedar, chestnut, oak, walnut, cherry, pear, hornbeam, even poplar or acacia could be useful and beautiful, depending on the work.
Then if you go to big shops for hobby and home decoration, usually multinational corporations, you can find rustic wood boards (usually pine or spruce), from plantations, or you go to pubs or restaurants and rustic wood is a more and more common trend, wood that often comes from Africa.
In the last year we even had seen a huge cedar and an oak that were transformed into chips by a landscape company.
For what we see there is an opportunity not yet developed in some areas of Italy, to work with wood, within a sustainable managing of woods and while taking care of territory.
We really hope that somebody will take the place of this men that we know, but there should be a market as well, as now the sector reveals many difficulties because of the global market and low quality furniture.
For this we can wait for institutions or market to change something, or we can be the change, starting to buy local wood and handcrafted products for our homes.
