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Unlikely Business Partners United by Fair Trade, Sustainability

› Posted December 6, 2008, by Kevin Havice, Tropical Salvage


Portland-Based Tropical Salvage Outfits New Palestinian Olive Oil Factory

Canaan Fair Trade's new showroom, with Tropical Salvage-made display shelves and furniture. Photo by Amanda Nunn.


How did a furniture manufacturing business headquartered in Portland connect with an olive oil producer in the West Bank? Through a shared commitment to Fair Trade — to creating healthy, sustainable employment opportunities in areas of economic hardship.

Canaan Fair Trade gets its olives and other ingredients from Fair Trade cooperatives in the area around Jenin, Palestine. The company contracted with Tropical Salvage, based in Portland, Oregon, to provide custom furnishings for its new state-of-the-art olive oil processing/bottling facility, showroom and offices. The new 32,000 square-foot West Bank building was just completed in late November.

The furniture was built using 100 percent salvaged tropical hardwoods by artisans in Indonesia, where logging (both legal and illegal) threatens some of the world's few remaining primary tropical forests.

Tim O'Brien, who founded Tropical Salvage in 1998 out of a commitment to protect those forests, was happy and surprised to be shipping two hundred pieces of furniture to a Palestinian customer. "It's amazing to discover how much people all over the world are drawn to our products and what we are accomplishing in Indonesia. There is a poetic symbol of hope in sending our furniture—whose strength and beauty is created entirely from salvaged woods and human ingenuity—to a country ransacked by conflict. Our hope and action for positive change joins Canaan's hope and action for positive change."

For more photographs, click here.