(Re)framing timber values: Cascade use metrics as a dynamic policy tool

Salvaged timber embodies a paradox of contemporary circularity: despite its capacity to store carbon and its long history of reuse, it remains marginal within modern construction. Its reuse is constrained by regulations that both shape and reflect the material's value. This paper reframes this paradox through the lens of value fluctuation-how financial, carbon, and social values oscillate and misalign across timber's successive lives, determining whether it circulates as resource, product, or waste. These sequential uses, known as cascade use, describe an approach to resource management that prioritizes biomass retention. Building on this framework, the paper proposes a value-centered cascade-use metric for salvaged timber as a speculative policy tool to visualize, modulate, and stabilize value, enabling longer and more successive cascades. Policy, thus understood as a design medium, can render the dynamic spatial and social consequences of material economies visible, diagnosing systemic frictions and prototyping regenerative, less harmful material futures.