By Jay Newton-Small / For the Journal
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.”
