My family visits Powell River often. My wife and I graduated from high school there many years ago and my post-secondary education was financed by employment in what was then the world’s largest newsprint mill. About 2,500 people were directly employed in the mill, manufacturing lumber, pulp, and paper for newspapers and packaging products.
Those jobs disappeared and the mill site is largely abandoned, perhaps awaiting return to the Indigenous nation forced off traditional land where Americans wanted to build a factory.
This week, the PBS show This Old House (S46 E13) had a segment that caught my attention. It involved an idle paper mill on Maine’s Kennebec River, a site now used to manufacture wood-based insulation. TimberHP is the first wood fibre insulation manufacturer in North America.
I wish British Columbia had committed a few creative minds to sustaining jobs in communities that no longer prospered through forest products.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14u5MnKj_p8
TimberHP grew out of a partnership between two entrepreneurs—Matthew O’Malia, an award-winning architect with a reputation for developing high-performance, cost-competitive designs; and Dr. Joshua Henry, a materials chemist with years of experience elevating solutions to conserve energy and produce renewable energy.
In 2016, Henry and O’Malia saw an opportunity to combine their talents to address a major contradiction that faces the construction industry: we insulate to reduce the energy required to heat and cool our buildings, but we do it with materials highly dependent on or directly derived from fossil fuels.
Neither Henry nor O’Malia could understand why wood fiber insulation— a performance-competitive, renewable, carbon-negative insulation that has been produced in Europe for two decades—was not being made in North America.
Categories: Economics
in-sights.ca 
We can’t export our raw materials fast enough it seems. But when it comes to planning for jobs here it’s “who cares?”
I was just writing a few letters to our politicians about the rush to send our gas and oil to
China, if the US won’t graciously take it (boohoo! Poor us!). Why not build refinery in Alberta?
And, yes, a great idea to revitalize the Powell River plant and make wood fibre insulation. We might even use some of those felled trees that are left behind on the clear cuts (30% I was told) creating fire hazards.
My family was in the lumber business since the days of my great great grandfather. This suggestion to create natural fibre insulation sounds like a winer to me!
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Thanks for the comment. Looking at the Maine factory outputting the wood fibre insulation, I was struck by the similarity to papermaking. Not to say the paper machines could be easily converted to insulation, but the processes, from pulping and screening out impurities to forming and drying the final product, are similar.
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