Who We Are

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Sawmill Sid is a family owned business that recovers and repurposes wood that typically is chipped or grinded and sent to dumps or landfill.  Last year we recovered over 6200 cubic meters in the GTA alone.  This wood is sawmilled and then wood such as Ash, Maple & Black Walnut is then revived & re-purposed into products like lumber, beams, flooring, corporate gifts & furniture.  So basically we provide Wood Recovery & Re-purposing solutions for what some in the GTA consider “Wood Waste”, while “carbon locking” tonnes of C02 from being emitted!  Yeah, we love what we do!

We are excited to announce that in a revenue share partnership with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, we are opening Canada’s first Tree and Wood Recovery Center.  This revenue share will provide Sawmill Sid an opportunity to recover & give life back to more trees, and provide an opportunity for the TRCA’s vacant land to earn revenue.

The Tree and Wood Recovery Centre will provide a location for community members, Businesses, Arborists & Tree Fellers a place to drop off trees, offer on-site sawmilling & portable sawmilling & provide educational coops & workshops, through wood projects and wood art.   Youth and adults alike are fascinated when they see a tree destined for landfill, sawmilled before their eyes and then turned into valuable wood products like:

• Fire place mantels
• Beams
• Lumber & siding
• Flooring
• Furniture

If urban wood is used for low value applications such as mulch, then the carbon locked in the wood re-enters the atmosphere in a few years… however urban wood utilization presents a "carbon-locking" opportunity. A cubic meter of wood stores about 1 tonne of CO2 so, for example, a dining room table made from Toronto wood would store about 55 kg of CO2 for the life of the table.

SO TOGETHER WE CAN CAPTURE THE CARBON AND DO SOME GOOD FOR ONTARIO’S WOOD!  Ask us how!

We are providing educational tours of the Tree and Wood Recovery Center that explains what we do in more detail, and gives audiences the benefits of seeing band saws, and the wood shop at work!  We also offer an on-site build your own product or make your own art component where you could make wood boxes, benches, mirrors, chalkboards and the list goes on.

We are striving to do our part in building sustainable communities.  Our goal is to re-purpose our wood products and turn the bi-products into biofuel.

 

Mission Statement:

Providing Portable Sawmilling and Re-Purposing Solutions to Urban Wood Initiatives throughout Ontario.

Vision:

The company’s vision is to partner with like-minded organizations and companies to promote public awareness of Urban Wood Resources and deliver Re-Purposing services and solutions that salvage Ontario’s value added wood and honor the environment.

 

The solution for Wood Waste:

Sawmill Sid Inc. offers an innovative, sustainable and ecological solution for Wood Waste from Ontario’s Ash Trees, other diseased trees, and trees that are fallen for development.  Urban wood is a timely consideration because municipalities and businesses are increasingly challenged with managing their wood waste.  This crisis can be turned into a unique opportunity for sustainable tree removal and urban wood re-purposing that goes beyond creating wood chips and mulch, and brings value back to the community through harvesting of trees that are already dead.  We also offer portable sawmilling services to mill urban wood waste that are often destined for the land fill.

More wood fibre is used to support our society every year, by weight, than our combined consumption of steel, plastics, and Portland cement.  In fact roughly one-half of all industrial materials used in North America are wood based.

Unlike metal and plastics, wood is renewable, and represents a virtually inexhaustible source of material when properly managed.  It is estimated that roughly 7 billion trees are growing in Canadian Cities and this figure is growing.  Roughly 3 billion cubic yards could be re-covered annually as good saw logs in Canada resulting in 400 million board feet a year.

We have been quite successful in milling logs out of barn beams, after natural disasters, on Native Reserves, and for reclaiming timbers that were cut down for commercial and residential development.  Sawmill Sid currently serves a diverse population of customers in the Ontario Market.

We were featured in a case study regarding uses of ash trees by the City of Toronto, where Sawmill Sid milled the lumber and then it was re-purposed to make a chair.

Sawmill Sid was also recently Commissioned by the City of Toronto to mill up “The Maple Leaf Forever Tree”.  Milling up this iconic tree was truly an honor and help the National Media, gained much needed public awareness on how to re-purpose the GTA’s Wood Waste.

Through Partners in Project Green, the Toronto Regional Conservation Authority and Bentall Kennedy, we completed our first pilot project milling up some dead Ash Trees.  This project was completed on-site at Bentall Kennedy’s Corporate Office at 10 Carlson Court in Etobicoke.  A local wood re-manufacturer agreed to purchase all the milled lumber which ultimately left less of a carbon footprint.

The City of Toronto agreed to provide Sawmill Sid Inc. with access to one of the City’s wood diversion lots to process lumber and wood bi-products, as part of a Pilot Project for Urban Waste Wood.

The purpose of the pilot was to test the viability for portable sawmilling on-site and to determine if the milled wood and bi-products were marketable.  Secondary to the viability of sawmilling on-site and the wood markets, was to determine if Sawmill Sid could down set or eliminate the cost of grinding or chipping to the City of Toronto, and in-turn could benefit taxpayers.

Although the pilot was successful, individuals and businesses could not drop off their urban wood to the City of Toronto’s wood diversion lots, and we were not utilizing the all of the bi-products.