How Ricci Wong of Timberbank is championing wood upcycling by using felled trees to make designer furniture and building materials

by Khoa Tran

Hong Kong is as much an actual jungle as it is a concrete one. Despite having more skyscrapers than any other city in the world, more than half of it is covered by trees and forests, with 40 per cent of the city protected in country parks. Despite the abundance, though, the trees are not suitable for use as timber for construction or even furniture, due largely to their irregular shapes and sizes; instead, wood for such purposes is mainly imported from overseas.
This fact alone bothered architect and designer Ricci Wong; he was even more concerned that trees that are uprooted during typhoons or cut down due to age aren’t taken advantage of. They are simply disposed of—sent to landfills as green waste and left there to decompose over years or decades. Something in this broken cycle didn’t make sense to Wong, who believes that local trees have more to offer and to teach us about living sustainably with our city’s rich natural heritage.

(read more press here)