By Lorraine Gennaro

Review Staff Writer

Christmas tree vendors sprout up on street corners this time of year, many keeping warm as the temperatures dip by lighting makeshift fires in metal trash barrels.

Normally, the workers scrounge up whatever wood they can, but the owners of a Newbold business are making things easier by donating their scrap wood as just another extension of their green philosophy.

For the first time last year, Carmana Designs, a custom cabinetmaking and mill shop owned by Carmen and Anna Maria Vona, began dropping off scrap wood that was lying around their shop in the former Abbotts’ Dairies, 17th and McKean streets, to tree merchants.

“It makes me feel really good that we’re keeping this stuff out of the landfill. We’re re-purposing it,” Anna Maria said. “We’re giving warmth and cheer. Everybody loves to see those fires this time of year.”

Last year’s the roughly nine recipients included lots where merchant Victor Rescigno set up shop at Front Street and Snyder Avenue; Ninth Street and Oregon Avenue; 24th Street and Passyunk Avenue; and 21st Street and Oregon. Carmen also made deliveries in his Newbold neighborhood, like to the tree lot at 10th and McKean streets and Broad and McKean.

Earlier this week, Carmen and several employees were preparing to do it all again by loading up his truck and cruising local streets seeking vendors like Rescigno in need of firewood.

“My husband was kind of like Santa Claus to all those businesses and they greatly appreciated it,” his wife said of last year’s efforts.

Monday afternoon, Rescigno, who has only one location outside Fireside Tavern at Sixth Street and Oregon this year, got a delivery. Tough economic times forced the seller to close all of his other locations, he said.

“The economy is really, really bad and it’s definitely hurting my business. I guess people want to eat before they buy a Christmas tree. The economy is really taking a licking on everybody,” he said.

Instead of relying on friends to drop off firewood or rustling up whatever odd bits he can find, once again Rescigno will maintain some level of comfort in the inclement weather as he staffs his spot 24/7 until he closes up midnight Christmas Eve.

“It keeps us warm and it’s green. We’re recycling wood for heat. This is actually top-notch wood to make his cabinets, so it’s hard, good wood that burns and maintains a lot of heat,” the businessman said.

Donated scraps are 1- to 2-inches wide and about 5- to 12-feet long that Carmen, a nationally known, award-winning designer and craftsman who launched his business in 1981, usually breaks up into smaller strips for easy burning. Comprised of oak, poplar, cherry, mahogany and maple, the pieces are generally moulding scraps.

“We only give hardwoods, no fiberboard,” Anna Maria said, explaining the latter runs the risk of releasing the toxin formaldehyde if burned.

Owning a 30,000-square-foot shop with dozens of clients makes for not only loads of scrap wood but sawdust, too. In keeping with their green ways, the Vonas have several novel uses for the remains. For nine years, they have been supplying the Philadelphia Carriage Co., a horse-and-buggy operation that gives tours of Old City, with the remnants to clean out stalls. Anna Maria got the idea to call the company after a trip to the Philadelphia Zoo, where she saw sawdust in some animal cages, she said.

The idea to donate the sawdust came to her in the middle of the night. She awoke with the idea, she said.

“We’re getting rid of sawdust when someone could be using it. I didn’t want to keep paying to get rid of this and I thought someone has to be able to use this stuff,” she said, adding it was costing $150 a month for the pick-up.

The relationship with the carriage company is a win-win for both parties, Anna Maria said. “They love it. They were paying for sawdust and we were paying to get rid of it, so it worked out great.”

This summer, the Vonas posted an appeal to gardeners on the Web site craigslist to come and collect free, long, thin sticks perfect for tomato stakes.

“We cut them up for people and make them pointy so they go into the ground,” Carmen said, adding, with lots of wood leftover from the summer, they decided to again drop off wood to tree vendors.

The couple’s green ways are simply an extension of their personal life.

“When it comes to throwing paper away, I don’t. Every shred of paper is re-purposed. We recycle everything. A lot of blueprints come in and I cut them down to scrap paper. Something that comes in the mail, if it is blank, we use it again,” Carmen said, adding even residue from their paper shredder becomes packing material.

The Vonas’ greening efforts date back some 29 years — before the en vogue term even was coined.

When the couple moved from Packer Park to the 1900 block of Chadwick Street in ’82 after Carmen’s parents died, Anna Maria recalls the area being pretty blighted with abandoned cars, prostitutes and drug users everywhere and trash strewn about the streets. A couple of years after moving in, the two decided to spruce up the place by planting trees, removing graffiti from walls and cleaning up the debris. In time, they hosted neighborhood Green Up Days, not knowing decades later greening would become an international movement.

With efforts spearheaded by the Vonas, the 1900 block of Chadwick won many City awards in the late ’80s and ’90s, including the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Greenest City Block in ’03. March ’06, the couple partook of the society’s TreeVitalize program and planted five hawthornes on McKean starting at the corner of 17th. Through the urban greening initiative, any resident who wants a tree need just fill out an application and request one as part of the organization’s commitment to restoring the tree canopy in Philadelphia and beyond. Around Thanksgiving, the Vonas’ tree-planting continued with about 54 additions to the Newbold area, again through TreeVitalize.

The couple views their scrap wood donations to tree vendors as simply another extension of their beliefs, and the merchants on the receiving end couldn’t be more grateful.

“It’s a real plus for us. Carmen is doing a good thing. Especially this week, it’s supposed to be really freezing,” Rescigno said.