During a stormy fall afternoon in September 2005, an F1 tornado ripped through Iowa State’s Central Campus.

In its wake, the tornado left almost 70 trees ripped from the ground or destroyed, including the largest scarlet oak tree in the state. The state record-holding tree sat southeast of the Campanile and, for many, was iconic to Iowa State.

On campus, when a tree falls or has to be cut down, the wood is usually repurposed into mulch and used for landscaping around campus. The process is sustainable, but for the oldest scarlet oak in the the state of Iowa, mulching seemed like a waste of beautiful wood.

Instead, Iowa State’s Facilities Planning and Management (FP&M) contacted design professor Chris Martin and asked if he had a use for the centuries-old tree.

The timing couldn’t have been better. Around the same time, Martin was asked to create furniture for the refurbished Christian Petersen Art Museum in Morrill Hall.

“In a nutshell it all kind of came together,” Martin said. “Why not have my students design pieces for the Christian Peterson Museum and make it out of the scarlet oak?”

Martin and his students used the wood to create benches for the museum. The process worked so well that, after a gift from the class of 2006 supported the cost of milling the wood, the TreeCYcle program was born.

“Since then, as trees come down on campus, we evaluate whether or not they’re appropriate for the furniture program,” said Rhonda Martin, a landscape architect at Iowa State’s FP&M who oversees the TreeCYcle program. “By appropriate I mean they have to be at a size that’s feasible to have them sawn into lumber.”

Rhonda Martin’s team also evaluates whether certain wood would make good furniture. If a tree is hollow or damaged, it’s usually unusable. If a tree is scheduled to come down due to construction, FP&M will begin the evaluation before the first cut is made. Trees not selected for the TreeCYcle program are turned into mulch.

Since then, Rhonda Martin estimates that the program has turned about 15 trees into usable wood every year.

“Some years maybe more, some years maybe less because we don’t always have a quality tree that we want to preserve,” Rhonda Martin said.

After a tree is evaluated and taken down, it goes into what Rhonda Martin calls the “boneyard,” a storage area for campus services to hold the fallen logs that will one day become pieces of art.

Once enough logs are collected, FP&M sends them to a saw mill to have them turned into lumber. The wood is then returned to the university where it is put in off-campus storage.

“There’s a couple ways that the wood moves back out again,” Rhonda Martin said. “If a department wants the wood … we can sell it to them because they’re an existing department. We have also sold wood to the Iowa Prison Industries, which is another Board of Regents institution. So we sell them wood and then they make things for campus.”

Students in Martin’s furniture design class can also purchase the wood to use for projects.

“[We] call it a sponsored project,” Martin said. “A department will decide that they maybe want something done and we can basically make that for them.”

Recently, Martin’s students created boxes for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. The boxes were made from the wood of a tree that was planted when Aldo Leopold was born in 1887. The tree, located in Burlington, Iowa, came down in a storm. Martin said they plan to use the same wood to build a conference table for the center.

Iowa State also sells small amounts of the wood as raw material through ISU Surplus, a warehouse south of campus that sells surplus items to the public every Wednesday.

Iowa State departments that purchase the wood usually put it to use in a number of different ways. Some will incorporate it into an existing building or construction project, others will hire campus services and use their wood-working shop to create furniture. Some will work with Martin and his students.

Wood that is sold to Iowa Prison Industries is always used in projects for Iowa State. These projects can be anything from creating furniture for buildings at Iowa State, like the wood benches in Carver Hall, Pearson Hall and Bessey Hall, to clocks and keepsake boxes that the Alumni Association sells in its online catalog.

While the wood sells for a small mark-up in price, Rhonda Martin said the goal has never been profit.

“I’d love to have more wood sell,” Rhonda Martin said. “The thing is our wood is unique and individual. People ask us about [where the tree came down]. People ask us specifically where was this tree. So we don’t really think about it as a commodity. It’s so individual.”

The process isn’t fast. Wood used for furniture needs to dry naturally. After a tree falls, the wood is moist and can shrink if used in furniture. If the wood is dried quickly using a kiln, it has the potential to warp.

“If a tree came down today, no one would probably want to use that wood for two years,” Rhonda Martin said.

While the pieces created from TreeCYcle’s wood are featured in campus hotspots like the Memorial Union and Geoffroy Hall, Martin said he would like to see more.

“As far as projects on campus, to be blunt, there haven’t been a lot, and there should be more,” Martin said.

For Martin, the ability to offer his students the chance to work with such great wood and the opportunity to work one-on-one with departments as clients, creates invaluable real-world experiences. Martin also uses some of the profits made by creating furniture to bring in visiting artists for students.

Merry Rankin, director of sustainability at Iowa State, said the program is a very creative way to approach the “inevitable occurrence” that trees will come down and that it is a great way to honor campus resources.

“I just think it’s been a really wonderful program,” Rankin said. “It has not only allowed us to reuse and honor this energy that has already been invested into a natural resource, but it also offers a really unique way for students to have an experience and have that hands-on engagement related to a different approach to sustainability.”