Sawmill Sid reclaims the urban forest

Couple finds treasures in trees destined for the chipper

Away from the neatly stacked tree slabs at the foot of Sid Gendron’s sawmill lies an oddly shaped sliced trunk. To Gendron, this one’s special.

“There’s a really nice collaboration of Mother Nature and that piece of wood,” he said. “Can you envision being on the other side of that? You’re serving us a drink, that’s your bar and this is your seated area,” he said with a hint of excitement.

“Something like this, most people would have just cut up. It would have been firewood,” because “if I make one more cut, it would be just too weak, right,” explains Gendron. Had Gendron and his team not picked it out in Etobicoke’s Centennial Park days earlier, it would have gone through the chipper — the city’s main method of disposing of trees.

That’s what Gendron’s business, Sawmill Sid, does. It picks high-quality chunks of wood out of city yards, pays $1 to $4 per metric ton, saws them into slabs and sells them to furniture makers.

To encourage that process and oth- ers like it, city council approved a two-year pilot project called the Green Market Acceleration Program on Sept. 30, to encourage “local businesses in the green economy.”

Through another green initiative, this time with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, Sawmill Sid may soon be able to use land loaned by the TRCA to eventually share profits with it, according to Gendron’s wife and partner, Sheila.

The city’s economic development agency reached out to the company after it was hired last summer to cut through Leslieville’s Maple Leaf Forever tree, toppled in a July 2013 windstorm, to explain the possibility of bidding for access to city yards.

The Maple Leaf contract was a catalyst for business — and showed Gendron what could be done with just one uneven tree. Each slab was a feat because of the tree’s shape, but they helped turn it into 150 projects and 4,025 individual items

For 15 years, their project had been a side gig, started when the couple’s house in Simcoe County caught fire and their insurer wouldn’t cover it.

Sheila Gendron bought a portable sawmill and the two set out to rebuild their home, using old road signs in place of plywood and milled reclaimed wood for their floors, doors and ceiling beams. “We had no money,” she said. “We learned how to repurpose things.” And so began a family’s trips from Tiny Township to the big city.

Last month, their two sawmills buzzed on an empty lot in Mississauga, where Sawmill Sid had been given access to 200-year-old tree stumps.

“We’re trying to show people the tree doesn’t have to go in a chipper,” said Richard Ruminski, a furnituremaker standing nearby.

It’s not the most efficient way to rid the city of its trees for now. The city has contracts with companies that turn the trunks to mulch in a streamlined process that’s already better than just throwing the wood away.

So, it’s been a little tough to sell the idea to the Urban Forestry department, which still has to hire the wood chipper for trees the salvagers can’t take, said Rob McMonagle, of the Green Economy unit at Toronto’s economic development office.

“If we could just get access to the high-value trees, then they could have 80, 90 per cent of them,” Ruminski said. Sometimes, that’s an odd-shaped tree like Maple Leaf Forever. Other times, it’s one with two burls in it that would make a nice bar.