What councils are throwing away (and shouldn't be)
Monday, 29 June 2026
Ben Kepes is a Canterbury-based entrepreneur and professional board member. He is a regular opinion contributor.
OPINION: I’m not a patient person. While I could wax poetic about the reason for my impatience being an awareness of how short life is and a desire to move the needle, the reality is that taking time to be still, to smell the roses and enjoy quietness isn't my strong suit.
I also have a hobby making furniture. Pottering around in my workshop is my happy place. But put these two things together, and it’s easy to see that, in my furniture-making guise, I focus on the outputs rather than the process. It’s for this reason that a young craftsman I know once advised me to go into my workshop on a weekend with the intent to craft just one single hand-cut dovetail. Focus on the process, the accuracy, the calmness, and be less driven by the outcome.
I’ve been thinking about this recently since bumping into David Laird. David is a true craftsman who takes urban trees – either dead ones or those that need to be removed because of development – and turns them into genuinely beautiful pieces of furniture.
Working from his workshop in Amberley, New Zealand, and trading under the name David Laird Chairbler, he applies traditional techniques, including milling, seasoning and steam bending, to produce things that will last for generations. He combines this traditional knowledge with chair-construction methods and some modern techniques to create an efficient process. In the manner of the old English bodgers, the woodworkers who once headed into the forest to select standing timber for hand-turned chair parts, David is reviving forms with centuries of history behind them.
But the interesting thing about David isn't really the furniture. Plenty of people make beautiful furniture. What's interesting is the raw material he chooses to work with.
Every year, thousands of trees come down across New Zealand. Some are diseased. Some are storm-damaged. Many simply stand in the way of development. Most end up chipped, burned or hauled away as waste.
David sees something different. He looks at a fallen elm, ash or oak and sees a future chair, a bench or a table that might still be in use 50 or 100 years from now.
He says as much plainly on his own website. His furniture is made from trees that have fallen or are past their prime – a gift from the past. Every Captain’s Chair, every stick chair and every flitch bench he builds starts life as wood that the rest of the industry has already written off. He takes pride in producing something of beauty, even out of nature's discards. It's the furniture-making equivalent of finding the perfect dovetail in a piece of scrap.
What's remarkable is how recently this would have seemed absurd. We happily celebrate the environmental benefits of living trees – their ability to store carbon, reduce runoff and make cities more liveable. Yet once those same trees come down, we generally treat them as a disposal problem.
That's an odd blind spot. After spending decades quietly growing, storing carbon and creating value, a tree's final contribution is often a short trip through a woodchipper.
A mature tree may spend a century pulling carbon from the atmosphere and locking it away in its structure. Whether that carbon stays locked up or is released back into the atmosphere depends largely on what happens next.
Turn that tree into firewood, and the carbon returns fairly quickly. Turn it into a chair that lasts a lifetime, and suddenly the equation looks very different.
There's something quietly radical in that. A tree grows for a hundred years in a paddock or on a street verge near Rangiora. It falls, or is felled. Rather than being trucked to a landfill or fed into a woodchipper, it ends up, a few kilometres from where it stood, as a chair that someone will sit in for the next 50 years, and likely hand down after that. The carbon stays put. The story of the tree continues, just in a different shape.
This is where local councils have an opportunity they mostly aren't taking. Every council managing street trees, parks and reserves eventually has to deal with removals, and right now most of that timber is treated as a cost to be disposed of as cheaply as possible. But a felled urban tree is a resource – often a good one – with real structural timber inside it.
A council that thought of its unneeded trees this way, partnering with local makers rather than sending logs straight to the chipper, could turn a disposal line item into genuine community value: furniture, public seating, even materials for local schools and workshops. It's a small shift in thinking with an outsized payoff, and David's workshop is a working example of what's possible when somebody bothers to look.
What I admire about David's approach is that it forces us to reconsider what we regard as waste. A tree falls. Most people see a disposal problem. David sees the beginning of another lifecycle. That's a useful lens to apply beyond timber. So much of modern life is built around extracting value quickly and moving on. David's work is a reminder that value often remains long after we've stopped looking for it.
Somewhere near Amberley, a tree that might have ended its life in a chipper is instead beginning another century as a chair. That's a rather lovely outcome.