How Trees Destroyed by the L.A. Fires Are Being Recycled Into New Lumber

After this year’s fires burned through the Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods, destroying over 16,000 structures, the city is reckoning with 4.5 million tons of debris, according to LAist—"the largest municipal wildfire cleanup operation in recent history." As a result, the Army Corps of Engineers is sending trucks to 18 different regional facilities including landfills and recycling plants to manage the process of clearing out build remnants and remediating hazardous materials. Trees that appear damaged or unviable are cut down and sent to a local golf course to be mulched—a fact that doesn’t sit right with local sawmill owner Jeff Perry.

For the past decade, Perry’s mill, Angel City Lumber (ACL), has sourced trees from Los Angeles County that have been cut down due to disease, pests, or development and transformed them into usable lumber. In the aftermath of the Palisades and Eaton Fires, Perry teamed up with local landscape architects Ruth Siegel (who is also the deputy director of the nonprofit Los Angeles Futures) and Blake Jopling (who works for Rana, a small landscape architecture practice) to create Altadena Reciprocity, an initiative that helps homeowners recycle an often-overlooked resource—neighborhood trees—into a product that residents can use for flooring, stair treads, door casings, and much more. By reusing these trees and selling the product at a low cost, post-disaster material reuse can immediately serve rebuilding efforts and address both the high costs of construction and the need for healing after disaster strikes.

Recycling after natural disasters is a net-good; rather than sending these materials to the landfill, concrete and metals can be safely recomposed for future projects. The Environmental Protection Agency cites a myriad of benefits, including generating revenue, creating jobs, and offsetting carbon outputs from landfilling or new product manufacturing. The agency states that, after disasters, asphalt can be re-aggregated into asphalt-concrete pavements, and metals like steel, bronze, and copper have high values and can also be sold as scrap. Wood, however, is usually relegated to landscape mulch, which, says Perry, is replicative of how cities usually deal with their dead or dying tree canopy.

Los Angeles County, for instance, has 13 million trees, says Perry. An average dieback scenario—wherein trees reach the end of their lifecycle—means around ten percent of those trees die each year. "That’s a lot of trees coming down, and we’re mulching them all." He calls this "insanity." "We’re basically operating out of a postindustrial, commoditizing-natural-resources mentality, where all the wood you get is from the Pacific Northwest, Canada, and Brazil, but all the wood that falls domestically—we chip it," Perry explains. "There’s around two billion board feet of wood that is consumed in the housing market of Los Angeles," adds Siegel. "Based on the dieback rates, there’s about the same or more wood in board feet available [locally], and we’re not using any of that."

The fires exacerbated the availability of dead, damaged, and downed trees; Jopling notes that the Army Corps also had to take down trees that might have survived, but were planted too close to homes and needed to be removed so that heavy machinery could safely demolish and clean up properties. For trees still standing, the trio is fielding phone calls from residents who need help surveying their tree’s health, tagging trees for removal, and working with the Army Corps to identify those that would be suitable for reuse. These damaged trees, Perry explains, aren’t just future lumber. While other groups have assembled in Los Angeles to salvage materials like handmade fireplace tiles—which speak to the city’s Arts and Crafts architectural history—reusing trees is akin to preserving Los Angeles’s urban planning and botanical history.

"Urban planners, over the last century or longer, chose certain species for ornamental reasons, usually to forest a given area, to give it more canopy," says Perry. As settlers arrived during the Gold Rush and began building up present day L.A., they chose eucalyptus, ficus, acacia, "and a lot of Australasian species that are fast growing and robust in an arid environment," he says, adding that Deodar cedar, California sycamore, and Aleppo pine, and Italian stone pine are also common. Jopling, who was born and raised in Altadena, notes that these trees flourished in the Palisades area, providing a distinct, dense canopy.

"It has to do with the development pattern in Los Angeles in the ’20s and ’30s, which also coincided with a time where there was a great botanical interest in tree species," Jopling says.

Most of these species aren’t commercially used in structural lumber, but ACL will likely be able to produce enough millwork-grade board for 500 rebuilt homes, says Siegel. It will be milled, air dried, and ready to be sold in a few years to coincide with anticipated permitting timelines. Jopling notes that many Altadena residents are running into higher costs to rebuild—as much as 40 percent more than originally anticipated—or are underinsured. To meet those needs, all of the repurposed lumber will be sold at or below market cost, primarily to Altadena residents who are looking to rebuild.

"Lumber prices have doubled since pre-pandemic times…it’s going to get even worse, given the tariffs and given this rush to rebuild all at the same time," explains Siegel. "I see this as an imperative mission to help with a rebuilding and to make it affordable for the community." Altadena Reciprocity, she continues, could become a model for how cities and counties respond to natural disasters in the age of material scarcity. Federal agencies could see their endeavor as a sustainable model for repurposing trees after hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods.

Importantly, trees also have meaning to many residents. As Jopling has traveled around Altadena to perform assessments, what should be a "quick process" quickly turns into a long and difficult conversation with homeowners about the struggle to rebuild. "It’s all these layers of sad, sad stories, but in great contrast to talking to people about their trees," he says. "It’s small relative to all the things that need to happen, but I’ll go and tag trees that people have asked me to come take a look at because they want to maintain a relationship with the tree after it goes." To preserve that bond, ACL offers to "save" a dead or dying tree on a property by having it cut and milled specifically for the homeowner. "Trees are really emotional," says Siegel. "You get attached to them on your property or in your neighborhood, and it’s that little silver lining, I think, that gives people a little relief after the trauma."  

Top photo by courtesy of Angel City Lumber.

Related Reading:

For These Designers and Homebuilders, the Best Materials Are Ones That Have Already Been Used

How Adaptive Reuse Can Help Solve the Affordability Crisis