Rebuilding Center A First For Portland

While several shops in Portland, Or., market selected salvaged items, such as vintage fixtures, the area now has a source for less exotic used boards and beams.

Shane Endicott and Janelle Schmidt have opened the Rebuilding Center, a non-profit center that buys and sells reusable plywood, end cuts, flooring, chipboard, siding, bricks, countertops, doors, windows, toilets, bathtubs, sinks, faucets, fixtures and other building materials.

"It's remarkable Portland didn't have one," says Schmidt. "There's so much potential, especially with the environmental ethic here."

The idea came to Endicott while developing and managing a pilot project, the Wood Depot, to market used building supplies for a Catholic charity. He and Schmidt visited 15 similar businesses along the West Coast before selecting their roomy warehouse.

A regional government agency, required to meet state-mandated waste-reduction goals, provided a $35,000 start-up grant. The partners chose non-profit status, enabling them to stock a wider variety of products longer, keeping more out of landfills, and to offer contractors tax deductions for donations, making recycling more attractive.

During the June 6 grand opening, the shop held a contest to select the most creative, useful and best built creation made completely from recycled materials.

Sell Redwood Electronically

California Redwood Association is setting up a product locator database on its Web site (www.calredwood. org) to help end-users looking for local sources for redwood lumber and specialty products.

Stocking wholesalers, retailers and specialty manufacturers (furniture, planters, architectural millwork, etc.) of redwood are invited to be listed.

Burning Trees For Electricity

High-tech power plants that generate clean, renewable electricity by burning timber are being researched by Shell and other firms.

Over the next five years, Royal Dutch/Shell Group will invest $500 million in renewable energy, includ- ing plantations that supply timber<r "biomass"-to burn as an electricity source. Long-range, Shell predicts that by the year 2050, the world's energy consumption of biomass for electricity generation will equal that of gas and oil today.

Energy use of biomass, which now accounts for l2%o of the world's primary energy, is rising l1Vo annually on a pace to reach 250 megawatts installed by the year 2000, says Shell.

UP Plans RR Spending

Union Pacific Corp. plans to spend more than $1.4 billion over the next five years, including up to $160 million this year on infrastructure in Texas and Louisiana.

To help fund improvement, UP is considering selling its $1 billion-ayear trucking business, Overnite Transportation Co., in a public offering. To return to its core railroad business, UP has been divesting real estate, oil, natural gas and hazardous waste subsidiaries, and is negotiating to sell its small contract logistics business, Skyway Freight Systems Inc. Improvements will stretch along a 530-mile corridor from San Antonio to New Orleans.

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