Academy alumni set goals as high as the highest tree -- systemic change in ground wood market

In the summer of 2020, Yale University forestry student Ben Christensen was home in Albuquerque weathering the pandemic like most students. He’d just left a large lumber waste pile, which collects waste wood from all over the city, in Los Ranchos and was walking into a Sprouts a couple of miles away when he noticed bundles of wood for sale for summer s'mores around the fire pit.

Curious, he looked at the tag: the wood had come from Estonia in Eastern Europe. That made no sense to him when there were 50 trees a day of perfectly viable wood being thrown away down the road.

This was the impetus that led Christensen, 28, together with his childhood best friend Theo Hooker, 27, and fellow Yale student Marisa Repka, 31, to start Cambium, named for the growth layer of the tree that facilitates nutrient exchange. The ambitious startup has raised more than $10 million in seed funding from Adrian Fenty’s MAC Fund, Steve Case’s The Rise of the Rest, and the Connecticut Innovation — and seeks nothing short of systemic change in America’s ground wood market.

“The way that we source materials today is bad for the planet and not good for society,” Christensen says during a conversation at a local coffee shop. “The focus is on virgin materials: Cutting down trees and then shipping them really far.”

Yet an estimated 36 million trees fall in and around U.S. cities every year, and the vast majority of those are wasted — just thrown away to yards like the one in Los Ranchos. Unlike the steel industry, which sees about 95 percent recovery and recycling, only 10 to 15 percent of fallen trees are recovered.

This is what Cambium is trying to change.

Christensen grew up in Sandia Park, the son of construction worker and carpenter — who was a wood artist in his spare time — and a hydrologist who worked on water conservation.

"So, looking back, maybe it was obvious that I’d get into wood conservancy,” he laughs.

His parents drove him around the mountain every day to Albuquerque Academy for school. He met Hooker playing soccer when he was 9 years old and the two were inseparable throughout middle and high school.

Christensen went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and then on to Yale Forestry School, where he met Repka. “She didn’t have a car and I did; we traded school help for grocery runs,” he recalls. “And she’s also a great soccer player.”

All three were very into environment and sustainability. After many months of ideation — and a $200,000 grant from the Nature Conservancy in September of 2020 — they incorporated Cambium on Jan. 1, 2021, as a public benefit corporation, companies dedicated to doing good in the world.

Cambium is a complex solution for a complex problem. It’s part consulting, part software and part marketplace. The best way to describe it is to follow a piece of wood through its system.

California is the U.S. home of walnuts and walnut trees have a life span of 30 to 50 years. Until Cambium, walnut plantations would cut down old trees and burn them as the logs are short and not the perfect size for traditional mills, who usually only take the best cuts of standardized farmed trees.

But Cambium is working with walnut growers in northern California to gather the old trees and mill them. They’ve created software, Traece™, that tracks the entire lumber supply chain from sourcing to delivery, ensuring traceability and transparency about the origin and carbon sequestration of each piece of wood. Up until now, the origin of any piece of wood you might find in one’s furniture or life is pretty murky. And one of Cambium’s goals is to get people asking: Where did this wood come from?

After the wood is milled, Cambium then brands some of it Carbon Smart Wood™ and sells it to big furniture companies. In this case, Room & Board, which has created the “Graft Table” out of this previously discarded walnut wood that it sells nationally. So, it’s a win-win-win: a win for the walnut plantations, a win for the mills and wood products producers and a win for the big furniture stores looking to showcase locally sourced, sustainable goods to an increasingly environmentally conscious clientele.

Cambium gets most of its revenue from sales of its branded wood to big companies like Room & Board, CBRE, Microsoft, Patagonia and, launching this month, Steelcase. Like most startups, the company was incorporated in Delaware.

After graduating from Yale, Repka and Christensen moved to Baltimore, where Cambium is now headquartered, though Christensen and Hooker split their time between Albuquerque and Maryland.

About five years ago, Hooker got Christensen into long distance running and Christensen ran his first 50-miler out in the Valles Caldera in August 2020. The two are training for the Marathon des Sables this month, which holds six marathons over six days in the Sahara Desert in Northern Africa.

Both men find allusions in long distance running with the work they’re doing.

“I learned that when you worship results, life doesn’t work that well,” Christensen says. “When you worship process, you have an opportunity for joy and success every day.” Every tree saved is a success, just like every mile run is a success: win or lose.

From 50 milers to 100 milers, Christensen keeps expanding his goals — and the same goes for Cambrium. While they’re starting with urban ground wood, like any New Mexican they know there’s tons of ground wood in forests from fallen trees to burn scars. Their next steps are clear, and they anticipate being back out for another round of venture funding this year to help them get there.

“Wherever you think you can go,” Christensen says, “is how far you can go.”

To this end, Cambium is seeing the forest through the trees.

Jay Newton-Small is CEO and founder of PlanAllies, a patient engagement software company that is personalizing how health insurers connect with their members. Previously, Jay spent a decade at Time Magazine, where she wrote nearly a dozen cover stories; and before that five years at Bloomberg News, where she covered the White House and politics. She also authored the 2016 best-selling book, “Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works.” She moved to New Mexico three years ago and currently calls the Northeast Heights home with her husband, two children and three dogs.