Sustainably sourced American hardwoods
Why a small Australian timber craft brand bought its billets out of New York rather than sourcing locally, and what the supply chain actually looked like.
The obvious question
The most common question we got from Australian press between 2014 and 2017 was a fair one: why buy timber from the United States when Australia has some of the most distinctive hardwoods in the world? The short answer is that the wallet line needed billets at a particular size and consistency, and at that size the American supply was simply more consistent. The longer answer is more interesting.
Billet size and grain
A Union wallet half is a small piece, around 95 by 70 by 6 millimetres, and it has to come out of a board with straight grain running the long axis. For a single half this is not hard. For a pair of halves grain matched from the same board, sequential cuts, this is much harder. We were running through perhaps fifteen square inches of clean book-matched stock per wallet. To produce that consistently, the mill needs to send stock that is straight, dry, and free of the small internal checks that show up in eucalypts more often than in temperate American hardwoods.
What we tried locally first
We did try. The first Union prototypes in 2014 were Tasmanian oak and Queensland walnut. The Tasmanian oak was workable but pale, and the colour did not photograph well in product shots. The Queensland walnut was beautiful but moved against the saw, with the interlocked grain producing tear-out under both the bandsaw and the hand plane on small pieces. Spotted gum was tested and rejected because the silica content tore through tooling fast at the volumes we needed. Jarrah was the closest local match, but reclaimed jarrah at the small billet size came with too many surprises (nail damage, internal cracks) to run through a small CNC.
The American supplier
We landed on a small mill in upstate New York that ran kiln dried stock from managed forestry land. The certification chain was documented. The species we used (White Oak, Black Walnut, Black Cherry) were all on the FSC sustainable yield register for that region. The orders were small by the mill's standards, several hundred board feet at a time, and they shipped via standard ocean freight to Sydney through a freight forwarder we used for the entire production run. The lead time was around eight weeks from order to dock.
Carbon footprint
It is not lost on us that shipping kiln dried timber from New York to Sydney is not the lowest carbon option. We did the rough numbers. For our production volume (roughly two thousand wallets a year at peak), the timber freight worked out to around 0.4 kilograms of CO2 per wallet over the ocean leg. By comparison, the kiln drying energy at the mill was around 1.1 kilograms per wallet. The hand finishing in Sydney was effectively zero. Local Australian timber would have removed the freight number but kept the kiln number, and would not have moved the total much. None of which excuses anything; it is simply the actual shape of the trade-off.
Why we said so openly
The brand pitched itself as honest about materials. That meant being honest about the sourcing trade-off too. We did not market the line as local Australian timber, and we did not pretend that imported American hardwood was a green choice. It was an aesthetic and consistency choice, made openly. Most of our customers seemed to prefer that to the alternative.