Building What Comes Next: A Backroads Reclamation Story

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Canada plans to build 3.87 million new homes by 2031. It's a bold commitment—and a necessary one. But while we rush to create more housing, we're quietly destroying the very materials those homes will need to be finished, furnished, and lived in.

Every day, buildings come down across Edmonton, Calgary, and cities coast to coast—structures full of old-growth Douglas fir that modern forests can't replace. Wood that grew for centuries, held up for generations, and now gets pulverized by an excavator in an afternoon before being sent to landfill.

The wood in a single heritage home—its floors, siding, millwork, trim—could finish dozens of new ones. Instead, it's discarded. Not because it's worthless, but because we haven't built the framework to save it.

This isn't just waste. It's short-term thinking, scaled nationally.

For years, experts studied the demolition waste crisis. Reports accumulated. Solutions stalled. Why? Because everyone hit the same wall: how do you transform a fragmented salvage industry—weekend warriors with pickup trucks, boutique shops selling barn doors—into something that works with established lumber supply chains?

The easy path was obvious: become another salvage shop. Cherry-pick the pretty pieces. Make good margins on small volumes while the real problem got worse.

We chose the hard path. Build what doesn't exist. Create systems where there's only fragmentation. Turn an industry of individuals into an ecosystem that scales.

Where others see demolition, we see systematic deconstruction. Where traditional salvage sees individual boards, we see material flows that need to match market demands.

Our innovation isn't in saving wood—anyone with a crowbar can do that. It's in creating the processes that make saving wood inevitable. Digital tracking from source to sale. Grading standards that turn chaos into categories. Processing that preserves both story and structure.

"One building at a time" sounds quaint. Try processing thousands of tonnes annually. Try being the solution municipalities call when they're behind on diversion targets. Try supplying manufacturers who need materials tomorrow, not someday.

The wood has heritage—of course it does. But heritage is what it has, not what we're building. We're building the machine that makes circularity boring. Boring like running water. Boring like infrastructure that just works.

Right now, thousands of buildings across Canada await demolition. In their bones: old-growth timber that modern forestry can't replicate. Without a framework like ours, that material dies twice—once when cut, again when landfilled.

But imagine this: Every building becomes a material bank. Every deconstruction feeds manufacturing and construction. Not because it's poetic, but because the recovery model exists to make it profitable.

The old way destroyed value and called it progress. The new way recovers value and calls it common sense.

Somewhere between those two ideas, an entire industry is being born.

We're not here to save boards. We're here to build systems for change.

Because when infrastructure works, circularity isn't an ideal—it's just how we build.

This is circular construction—and this is how it begins.