Pilot aims to turn waste wood into lumber

September 2, 2022


Sample of lumber made from waste wood. | Deadwood Innovations


A B.C. company is starting a pilot program in a mothballed northern sawmill to turn waste wood into commercial lumber.
Deadwood Innovations, of Fort St. James, in a joint venture with the Nak'azdli Whut'en First Nation, has a pilot-scale mill based in the former Tl'Oh Forest Products mill in the northeastern B.C. community. The B.C. government is working with the group to fund the development of a commercial-scale plant.
"Deadwood Innovations and our partners have the expertise and technology needed to modernize B.C.'s forestry industry and create new opportunities in communities like Fort St. James,” said Deadwood Innovations president Owen Miller.
The provincial government has provided $200,000 over the past two years to help develop the technology and build the pilot plant.
Design of the commercial-scale plant is expected to start September 2022. The technology focuses on using materials left over from logging and forestry, wood damaged by pine beetles, and fire-damaged trees.
By using material that is normally burned in slash piles, it will reduce waste and carbon emissions from the forest sector, according to Miller.
“We can take low quality, small diameter softwoods that are cracked, impacted by pine spruce beetles, or burned in a fire with a layer of charcoal on the outside. Our process doesn’t care,” said Miller. “We can transform that into an engineered wood product that is of varying dimension and density.”   Target species of wood include those that are underutilized, like aspen and northern hardwoods, because they normally don’t have uses that make economic sense.