WHAT WOOD IT TAKE?

Ricci Wong's Timberbank promotes wood upcycling to inspire businesses to rethink their relationship with nature

- 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’s land 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.

Wong used to work as an interior designer, and says it has long been common to import timber—like walnut, oak or birch—from the US to make furniture. “But when a tree falls right [outside] your home and you know it’s going to end up in the landfill, it just feels so wasteful.” Local timber, he says, can work well in many cases; it just takes a little more time and dedication.

In the aftermath of Super Typhoon Mangkhut in September 2018, Wong rented a truck and headed to the landfill in Tuen Mun. The government was piling tree debris there, having exhausted the capacity of a makeshift storage area at the former Kai Tak Airport, and he was curious to see what he could salvage. Mangkhut uprooted about 60,000 trees, according to the city’s Development Bureau; the numbers are likely higher given the trees that weren’t officially counted in more remote areas. All were headed to the landfill.