6x6 posts sold by West Coast Juniper.

Mark Cobb, owner of West Coast Juniper Distributing, likes to point out that people in California don’t understand how he can sell lumber from juniper.

“They wonder how you can use a shrub for lumber,” he says. “They’re used to seeing it in their landscaping.” But Cobb’s 18-month old Chiloquin, Ore.-based company relies on a sturdier—and much less appreciated—species of juniper commonly known as the Western juniper or Juniperus occidentalis.

Cobb is taking Western juniper, considered by many a weed across the deserts and range lands of eastern Oregon, southwestern Idaho and northern California, and marketing it as a waste-turned-green lumber product.

Juniper is an invasive species that has become the target of a federal eradication program. Until now, removed trees were burned. About 80 percent of each Juniper log ends up as waste during the milling process, compared with just 20 percent of a pine log ending up as waste. Milling juniper just didn't pencil, Cobb says.

In 2006, Cobb started marketing non-structural lumber from Western juniper as a green-building product that costs about the same as comparable products using pine lumber. He works with three mills in Idaho and Oregon, which provide him with milled lumber. The enterprise has brought logging jobs back to areas where logging jobs shrank thanks to rising prices for pine, Cobb says.

His company sells five types of flooring, wall panels, decking, outdoor posts, moldings and trims using a supply set to last for “untold years” at current sales rates. Cobb says. The company also sells the waste to a door manufacturer that uses the high-fiber material for door skins.

In 18 months, Cobb says the company has earned $300,000 in sales all over the world. Over the next year, he sys he expects sales to increase by 50 percent.