The role of building supply retailers is a crucial one in the transformation of materials use in building. It is the point of connection between producers and end-users, between production and consumption. In the existing economy, it is a place geared to pushing out as much stuff as possible. The question is: in an ecological economy that is based in the selling of services, what would an ecological lumberyard look like? Undoubtedly very different than existing ones. Despite the growth of the green building movement, easy access to ecological materials is one of the major problems of environmentally-minded builders and designers. But the retail landscape for building materials is multi-levelled, with different challenges at each level. Here I will focus on general retailers, as opposed to specialty producers that retail directly to the public. The latter are increasingly numerous, and their growth is made more possible by Internet marketing, but it is general retailing that is of more strategic concern for community development. Among generalized retailers, there are (1) those that sell exclusively green products; (2) conventional building supply retailers who are consciously trying to increase the number of green products they carry, and who strongly promote ecological products; and (3) large mainstream building supply retailers who are responding variously to regulatory pressure, market demand and the growth of the green building industry.