Turning House Furniture is about to give new life to vintage wood from R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. warehouses.
Turning House, based in Bassett, Va., will use wood from beams and decking in warehouses built in the 1920s and '30s to make furniture, flooring and architectural elements.
"The woods that were used to build the beams and the floors of these tobacco warehouses offer a great sense of history," said Spencer Morten III, the chief executive and chairman of Turning House Furniture. "We plan to extend that life and create a new history by making tens of thousands of beautiful furniture pieces with these reclaimed woods that can't be found anywhere else."
He said that the wood -- primarily Southern longleaf pine -- discovered in the beams and decking will save more than 92 acres of full-growth forest, or about 1,403 trees.
More than wood will be recycled from a total of eight sheds, which are about 22,000 square feet each, from Reynolds Tobacco's Whitaker Park operation. The buildings also have metal roofs, aluminum siding and concrete slabs.
When Reynolds Tobacco decided last year that the surplus buildings would be torn down, the company chose to recycle the sheds as opposed to "knocking them down and carting everything away to the landfill," said Steve Strawsburg, the vice president of corporate social responsibility for Reynolds American Inc., the parent company of Reynolds Tobacco.
Turning House Furniture tore down two of the warehouses, and D.H. Griffin, a Greensboro company, is handling the remaining buildings.
The project is expected to be completed by the end of the year, providing recyclables that include 300,000 board feet of wood, 225 tons of metal and 24,000 tons of concrete, Strawsburg said.
"That concrete will actually be torn up, carried away, ground down, and used in a variety of uses," he said. "It can go into being bedding for roads, for bridges. Some of it can end up in concrete and end up in other building materials. Gravel is one of the biggest uses, so it's a unique reuse of a concrete slab."
Reynolds' goal is to recycle 95 percent of all material across the board.
"So what you've got here, I think, is a real demonstration of R.J. Reynolds' corporate citizenship, recycling old sheds for new use and at the same time, by doing that, improving the environmental footprint of that land out there," Strawsburg said.
Turning House and its sister company, Turning House Millworks, are subsidiaries of Bassett Mirror Co., which was founded in 1922.
Turning House Furniture has used reclaimed lumber from such historical sites as the Corriher Mill in Landis, the Rip Van Winkle Distillery's Lawrenceburg Warehouse in Lawrenceburg, Ky., and the Bessemer City Cotton Mill in Bessemer City.
Morten said that customers can find such aspects of nature as worm holes and mineral streaks in Turning House's furniture.
Because the company groups wood by harvesting location, species and quality grade, each Turning House product contains an authentication packet that offers a history of the building from which the wood for that particular piece was harvested.
fdaniel@wsjournal.com
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