Philly collects 2,000 tons of downed trees a year. Now, it’s milling them for sale as commercial lumber.

Philly’s Fairmount Park Organic Recycling Center in West Fairmount Park receives up to 2,000 tons a year of downed trees that crews haul in from the city’s parks and streets. The trees are ground into mulch or wood chips available to residents.

But a lot of those trees — oak, cherry, maple, ash — are valuable hardwoods.

Now, the city believes it can capitalize on that by milling its own lumber for commercial sale with a new 13-foot sawmill and dedicated crew at the recycling center.

The Philadelphia Reforestation Hub, conceived by the city’s Parks and Recreation Department during former Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration, started cutting wood in January after receiving electrical power for an open-air shed with sawmill.

Since then, the nonprofit PowerCorpsPHL has trained staff in milling. Although the initial product range is limited and sold locally, that could expand. The hub’s goal is to reduce waste and cut carbon emissions.

Located at the recycling center on Ford Road, the hub provides workforce training, aligns with the city’s sustainability goals, and prevents trees from ending up in landfills. As part of Philadelphia’s plan to divert 90% of waste from landfills by 2035, the initiative supports Parker’s vision of a “safer, cleaner, greener city.”

Under a partnership with Cambium, a private start-up specializing in salvaged wood, the trees are being transformed into lumber.

“The reforestation hub is a testament of the power of private-public partnerships,” said Susan Slawson, commissioner of Parks and Recreation.

PowerCorpsPHL oversees daily operations of the hub. The group runs a “green collar” workforce development program that provides training and job opportunities to underemployed and unemployed 18- to 30-year-olds living in Philadelphia. Green-collar jobs have a focus on the environment, conservation, and sustainability.

The Reforestation Hub, part of the city’s sustainable urban forestry plan, will allocate 15% of its revenue to TreePhilly to plant new trees in neighborhoods that lack greenery and shade. TreePhilly, jointly run by Parks and Recreation and the Fairmount Park Conservancy, actively hosts tree giveaways for residents.

To date, the hub has diverted 678 trees from becoming waste and produced 68,120 board feet of wood. It was funded initially by $277,000 from the city budget and a $250,000 grant from the U.S. Forest Service.

Julia Hillengas, executive director of PowerCorpsPHL, believes other municipalities will look to Philadelphia as a model for sustainable urban forestry.

“I love this project,” Hillengas said. “As someone from Philly, it’s a huge point of pride. It took a while to get off the ground, but we’re really demonstrating what can happen for cities in a really innovative way.”

As of now, the mill is just getting started, and making mostly tree stakes. Hillengas and her crew are working with Cambium to find markets for wood products the mill is capable of producing.

The city has a ready supply of trees. Indeed, a single storm can knock down lots of trees, which get taken in and sorted for best possible use. The emerald ash borer, and invasive beetle from Asia, has been destroying ash trees for years, and the city has been removing them. So the city has a supply of ash, used in furniture and hardwood flooring, on hand.

Builder-grade lumber sells for more than wood chips.

Already, hundreds of felled trees have been tagged with a bar code that logs the size and species of each. An app allows workers to see data on each tree.

Hillengas has connected with local artisans and musical instrument makers who are looking for specific types and grades of wood. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) has ordered thousands of wooden stakes used to prop up newly planted trees throughout the city. Originally, PHS wanted oak.

“We said, ‘Hey, would you engage with us and test some other species because we’d like to save the oak?’” Hillengas recalled.

PHS began testing stakes make from different kinds of wood and found sycamore worked just as well. They ordered 7,000 sycamore stakes.

“That was great,” Hillengas said, “because no one wants sycamore.”

Cambium provides expertise with mill operations, sales, and partnership development. Its Traece software tracks the origin and carbon content of each piece of wood, ensuring buyers that it comes from the Philly hub. Eventually, lumber will be open for sale to residents.

Marisa Repka, cofounder of Cambium, said the company has partnerships with other cities, but Philadelphia’s arrangement is unique. In other municipally owned mills, either the local government handles everything or, when Cambium is involved, the company handles everything. The company has arrangements with 188 sawmills around the U.S. through its Traece platform.

“Philadelphia is really a first-of-its-kind on the public-private partnership, instead of us just working on the private side of things,” Repka said. “A lot of eyes are on Philly to see how it goes.”

The company taps its data to find the best uses for each species. That knowledge, she said, is critical because the company really doesn’t know what types of wood it will be getting, unlike other lumber operations that buy from timber companies.

Cambium has a manufacturing facility in Baltimore where wood is run through a kiln and made into the company’s own products. As of now, Cambium is only taking small amounts of Philly’s wood to that location for transformation.

“The goal is finding sales in the Philly metro area,” Repka said.

Freddy Ortiz, 31, of Kensington, is a PowerCorpsPHL member. He was in its urban forestry program, and interviewed for a job at the mill, which he received. He’s now a sawmill operator trainee, with the goal of becoming a sawyer.

“It’s been great,” Ortiz said. “It’s hard work, but I love the work.”