Deep inside Fairmount Park, some hardworking dreamers are changing the way Philadelphia treats, uses and benefits from trees that historically would have been thrown in a dump.
The Philadelphia Reforestation Hub, found within the park’s Organic Recycling Center (ORC), is focused on integrated wood waste diversion. Part of its approach to urban forestry management, the hub assesses logs salvaged from across the region — the result of ice and snow, wind, storms and removals for manicured parks — for possible new uses. In 2024, the hub diverted nearly 450 logs from waste piles, milling enough to remove more than 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere. And at least 15% of the proceeds generated from lumber sales that year went to TreePhilly, which plants trees in the city.
At the heart of the hub are Carlos Alvarez, director of social enterprise operations, and sawmill operations manager Freddy Ortiz. Together, they have graduated four trainees and taught hundreds of Philadelphia schoolchildren about the social and environmental benefits of saving, using and repurposing fallen trees, while spotlighting best practices for safety and proper tree care.
The hub’s beginnings date back to 2019, when Philadelphia Parks & Recreation sought to increase ORC’s projects.
The Parks & Rec sustainability team looked to the Baltimore Wood Project, a group that operates an urban sawmill, to learn how it diverted wood waste and created economic opportunities.
Alvarez, an Urban Wood Academy graduate, became the project lead in 2022 after PowerCorpsPHL won a contract to create a permanent lumber yard and urban sawmill two years earlier.
Today, the hub makes garden bed kits, stump stools, outdoor benches and wood rounds for arts and crafts, among other items, from freshly sawed green and air-dried lumber, according to Alvarez.
Ortiz, the sawmill operations manager, believes what they do has the potential to change people’s lives. “Many people see only blue-collar jobs, but there are tons of people who want a green job, who want to be connected with nature and be part of something that connects them with the outdoors,” he says. PowerCorpsPHL trainees can apply for a one-year term as a sawmill operator apprentice, during which they learn to maintain chainsaws, skid steers, sawmills and related tools, and about arboriculture, tree identification and causes for tree failure in cities.
In late 2023, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) partnered with the hub to use the city’s downed trees to create stakes for the PHS Tree Tenders tree-planting program. The initial order of 1,000 stakes soon grew to 2,500. Dana Dentice, trees field operations manager for PHS, explains that the hub’s upcycling of discarded wood to support juvenile trees is growing the next generation of the region’s urban forest. “The work is fostering both a better environment and a skilled workforce, with skills that transfer across industries,” she says.
The hub has created various wood products for groups such as the Fairmount Park Conservancy, Greenland Nursery and Farm Philly, and has provided specialty pieces for the Wintergarden on the Greenfield Lawn in Dilworth Park and mycelium for Thomas Jefferson University.
“This has been a great partnership with the City,” says Alvarez. “So many young people have seen the importance of having a closer relationship with nature. There are jobs they never would have learned about, and now they see a chance for a different future.”
trims a log from
a fallen tree so it
can be processed into lumber. Photo by Tracie Van Auken.
