Reclaimed and live edge furniture offer a significant eco-friendly advantage by repurposing trees that have fallen during storms or been cut down for property development. Unfortunately, the increasing demand for live edge furniture has led some businesses to resort to unethical practices, such as sourcing wood slabs from unsustainable sources overseas rather than local or domestic mills.
Domestic ethical and sustainably sourced slabs come at a much higher cost due to labor expenses being 10 times higher in the US compared to Thailand or Central America. The materials go through various stages in turning a tree into a table that requires specialty equipment, knowledge and experience, space and time to carefully prepare the wood slabs for furniture. Natural wood slabs are particularly prone to drying and movement issues caused by sudden temperature changes. Hastening the process and transporting them across the ocean to an unknown climate only exacerbates these issues.
These wood shops' incentive is to crank out as many wood slabs, live edge tables, and stump tables as they can in the shortest amount of time. Rather than logs seasoning for years air drying before kiln sanitation, surfacing, and creating into a table, the process is reduced to weeks or months. As long as they can show its been baked to kill any bugs, its ok to ship.
This furniture is built to be as generic as possible, not at all personalized or made with any input from the client regarding the selection of the wood slab from shape and color to various characteristics of each wood type, resin colors, or steel/wood base design.
This push to create live edge furniture as cheaply as possible in large volume completely removes the core sustainability advantage that popularized and incentivizes natural wood slab materials to begin with. There is an immediate concern for the de-forestation of the Jungles in Costa Rica and Thailand caused by the harvesting of living giant tropical trees. Add 10-20 gallons of plastic for every river table made from them to make environmental impact worse rather than improving it.
When I source wood slabs for a furniture order I first look for local AZ options or from Maple, Walnut, or Redwood that I bring in batches from Washington, Oregon, California. This keeps money flowing in our local or US economy with other small businesses while keeping trees out of the dump or from dead trees fuelling forest fires. Using reclaimed wood slabs to create furniture is taking hundreds of pounds of stored carbon in the wood fibers
American Woodshops Using Import Wood Slabs
Many woodshops across America have struggled to compete with the importers because of the higher cost with local ethically sourced wood slabs and instead of focusing on a higher quality product they've joined forces and buy whole containers of raw imported wood slabs.
Many of these woodshops buy these containers full of Perota, Cashew, and Acacia slabs knowing full well they havent been properly dried or flattened. Worst case scenario, they sell them as-is for about $2000 and their customer gets what they paid for, unknowingly.
Best case scenario - they check moisture content and kiln dry again before building a table, flatten the wood slab, reinforce cracks and voids with resin or patches, add steel C channel supports, refinish all sides of the table top, and properly fasten the base,
The shops that import the wood slabs and re-kiln dry, flatten, resin fill and finish them in the same way as they would process an American Black Walnut slab usually charge $5-7k depending on their audience and branding. I've also seen some shops try to play up the imported factor like its an exotic up-sell feature and charge $40,000 for a table that cost them $4k to build.
What's in furniture stores...
Most furniture stores across America including Scottsdale and Phoenix as well as luxury design hubs like Southern California and NYC are selling import live edge tables and stump/root tables. Many of the stores in the design districts across the country that used to sell furniture from local craftsmen are mostly selling import live edge furniture now. These stores arent selling the ones that have been fixed by local woodshops - that would take away a lot of the profit for them.
Many of these stores have a 50% return rate because the slabs are bowed and twisted, poor quality finish, all the cracks and voids are open and the tops are not fastened to the base. I get calls from people who want me to rebuild these pieces and the cost is higher than they paid to begin with. This is because that work was never put into these tables, or done in hurry for max profit.
Scaled Blend of Operations
Many of the most successful live edge and reclaimed wood furniture shops have either started as a tree service, or expand to become one in process of trying to keep more of the money in their pocket. It costs a lot more to buy dry wood slabs that are ready for furniture. Most sawmills are buying the logs from landscapers, they mill the logs into slabs, stack and sticker them for airflow to airdry them for several years, kiln sanitize, and some sawmills also offer flattening or surfacing on a CNC or router table,
Live Edge furniture shops or sawmills that also have an in-house tree service or landscaping company to feed it hardwood logs have an immediate major advantage for low cost materials, but at the expense of a lot of heavy equipment like logging trucks, loaders, sawmills, forklifts, kilns, slab flattening tables, and the space and crew to run everything.
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