For the past 18 years, I’ve operated as JP Engineering and as a sole proprietor. I have decided to form a corporation for several reasons. 

Since there is a JP Engineering (one I’m not affiliated with) that is a corporation in southern California, I had to find a new name. While looking for inspiration for a name, I consulted my family and went on walks to see if something came to mind. One day, I noticed a piece of driftwood my son had brought home and sat near the porch. This piece of wood had once been part of a tree, fell into the ocean, drifted for how long, provided protection for ocean creatures, ended up on the beach, then picked up and recycled into a yard ornament. During my time in college, I never considered a lawn ornament to be a useful case for wood, but every time I see this in our yard, it brings me memories of travel, beach time, and a little bit of tranquility to an otherwise non-tranquil environment. 

While structural wood isn’t normally considered recycled, it certainly is not the first use case for the wood; that would have been as part of the tree. When used in construction, a renewable resource is recycled into a useful structure that can be recycled after its useful life. 

For most of my career and schooling, this was not a primary factor in structural design (the primary being cost). We are seeing a trend in bringing structures back to natural building materials that have a reduced environmental impact compared to other solutions. 

As a sailor who has sailed 1/3 of the way around the world (svroundabout.blogspot.com), I fully support the reduction of our environmental impact. There are many more choices in construction that can also reduce our impact (choice of insulation, floor finishes, lighting, HVAC…) but wood provides a structural solution that is time-tested, well-known, cost-effective, and environmentally one of the best solutions available today. 

So why Driftwood Engineering? Driftwood, like our structures, are temporary islands of life that protect the creatures that inhabit it, eventually recycled into our environment after their useful life. While we may think of our structures as permanent, they are very temporary (except for the Greeks who have structures from 4000+ years ago). We can choose materials that will be recycled into something else or that will need to be put into a landfill, possibly as a hazardous material. Our children’s children will be better off if we can build with a driftwood mentality, that everything we build is part of a cycle of life.