What is The Wood Store?

The Brighton & Hove Wood Recycling Project, known as The Wood Store, provides a wood collection service below the cost of a skip or other disposal option. All the timber that is collected it brought back to our premises where it is sorted and prepared for re-supply or to be transformed into beautiful objects and furniture.

Founded in 1998, Brighton & Hove Wood Recycling Project was the first of its kind in the country, dedicated to recycling waste timber and seeing it for what it really is: not something to discard but a precious resource.

How is The Wood Store supporting nature and sustainable practices in the biosphere?

Promoting sustainable practices

The Wood Store exists to help protect the environment by stopping as much reusable timber as possible from ending up in landfill or being incinerated. Our tagline is Reclaim, Reuse, Recycle. Leading the way in the local circular economy, we’re a charity and our aims are:

• Protecting the environment by conserving resources – collecting, recycling, and re-using reclaimed waste wood, operating throughout East and West Sussex.
• Educating and promoting behavioural change – through both educational materials and the collection, re-use and sale of sustainably-produced timber and timber products, all at greatly reduced costs to the public.
• Changing lives, relieving unemployment and social exclusion – by providing jobs, work placements, training, qualifications, mentoring and volunteering opportunities for local people.

Everything we collect is reused or recycled – nothing is returned to the waste stream. Reusing wood is 10 times more efficient than harvesting, milling, and transporting virgin wood. Even our collection methodology saves carbon! Our 3.5-tonne collection trucks use less than half the fuel of a skip lorry, greatly reducing CO₂ emissions, pollution and the impact on the road.

With every tonne of wood we collect, we are creating work and training opportunities for disadvantaged people – changing lives for the better.