On a Tuesday morning in March of 2009, Lana Vandermir stood in the parking lot of the Muning Cedar Pencil Mill in Sauk County, Wisconsin, and watched a dump truck back up to the edge of her property line and unload four tons of cedar slat scrap onto the ground she'd been trying to farm for 3 years.
The driver didn't stop to apologize. He didn't even slow down. He just raised the bed, let it fall, and drove away, leaving a pile of thin, fragrant, pale gold wood strips 8 ft high and 30 ft wide, sitting exactly where her fence used to be before the spring floods took it out.
Lana was 22 years old. She had $40 in her checking account, a used pickup truck with a cracked windshield, and a notebook she carried everywhere that was already half full of ideas nobody had asked for.
Let me tell you about Lana Vandermir, because you need to understand the woman before you can understand what she built. And what she built is the reason this story is still being told 15 years later.
Lana grew up on the Vandermir family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin, a piece of ground her great-grandfather had cleared in 1921 and that her grandfather had expanded to 280 acres before the farm crisis of the 1980s took most of it back.
By the time Lana was born in 1986, her parents were farming 90 acres of river-bottom ground that flooded twice a decade and a hillside parcel that grew rocks better than it grew anything else. Her father, Garrett Vandermir, was a methodical, quiet man who farmed the way his father had farmed and his father before that: row crops on the flat ground, hay on the hill, a small herd of beef cattle that never quite paid for themselves, but that Garrett couldn't bring himself to sell because his grandfather had started the herd, and it felt like a kind of abandonment to let them go. He was not a man who asked questions about whether there was a better way. He was a man who got up at 5:00 in the morning and worked until dark and believed that consistency was its own kind of answer.
Lana was not that kind of person. She had known it since she was 12 years old and started keeping the notebook. A spiral-bound composition book she bought at the drugstore in Baraboo with her own money and filled with observations, questions, sketches, and calculations that her teachers called creative, her father called impractical and her mother, a quiet woman named Ing who read everything she could find and said very little about what she thought, called necessary. Lana went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a partial scholarship and studied environmental science with a minor in materials engineering and in her junior year she took a seminar taught by a professor named Dr. Anelm Krueger, who specialized in sustainable material cycles, the science of what happens to industrial byproducts when nobody wants them, and what happens when somebody figures out they should.
Dr. Krueger had a phrase he used so often. His students put it on a mug they gave him at the end of the semester. The phrase was, "Waste is just a material that hasn't found its purpose yet." Lana wrote it down in her notebook. She underlined it twice.
She came home to Sauk County in 2007 with her degree, her notebook, now the fourth one in a series, and an idea her father didn't know what to do with. The idea was this: the Muning Cedar Pencil Mill, which had operated 6 miles from the Vandermir farm since 1954, produced roughly 40,000 board feet of cedar slat scrap per year. Thin strips of aromatic cedar cut from the billets used to make pencil casings, too narrow and irregular for any structural use, too fragrant and beautiful to simply burn, and too abundant to ignore. The mill had been dumping this scrap for decades, sometimes burning it in a permitted waste pile, sometimes giving it away to anyone who would haul it, and sometimes, as Lana discovered when she started asking questions, simply leaving it in piles on whatever low-value land was nearest the mill's back fence, the Vandermir property line was, as it happened, exactly that.
Her father listened to her explain this at the kitchen table on a Sunday evening in October of 2007. He listened the way he listened to everything without interrupting, without nodding, with his hands flat on the table and his eyes focused somewhere between her face and the window behind her. When she finished, he was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "I need to think about it." which, in Garrett Vandermir's language, meant he had already decided no, but was too decent a man to say it out loud before he'd slept on it.
Lana's mother, Ing, cleared the dishes without a word. On her way past Lana's chair, she set her hand briefly on her daughter's shoulder. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to. Let me tell you about what Lana had actually figured out.
Because the idea sounds simple until you understand the science behind it. And once you understand the science, it stops sounding simple and starts sounding obvious, which is exactly the kind of idea that makes the people who missed it the most uncomfortable. Aromatic red cedar, the species Juniperus virginiana, the same wood the Muning mill had been cutting into pencil slats since 1954, contains a compound called cedrol, a natural sesquiterpene alcohol that acts as a powerful insect repellent, particularly against the clothes moth Tineola bisselliella, which is responsible for destroying an estimated $750 million worth of wool, cashmere, and natural-fiber clothing in American homes every year. This is not folk wisdom.
It is documented, peer-reviewed, and confirmed by entomologists at land grant universities going back to the 1930s. The cedar chest, the aromatic cedar hope chest that generations of Midwestern women filled with quilts and wedding linens, was not a sentimental tradition. It was functional chemistry. Cedrol in the wood vapor phase diffused into the enclosed airspace and killed moth larvae on contact, protecting natural fibers without chemicals, without mothballs, without any intervention at all beyond the wood itself.
The problem, as Lana had understood it since her seminar with Dr. Krueger, was that the modern closet had replaced the cedar chest entirely. Closets were built from pine MDF wire shelving and particleboard. They were painted and laminated and sealed, and they offered no protection whatsoever to the wool suits and cashmere sweaters and natural fiber garments that American households were buying in increasing quantities as the premium clothing market expanded through the 1990s and 2000s. Meanwhile, the pencil industry was generating tens of thousands of board feet of aromatic cedar slat scrap per year at mills across the country, wood that was already cut, already dried, already fragrant, and already being thrown away.