With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/950283
R evelstoke has beautiful moun- tains—except for maybe one. "This is Mount Hog," says Downie Timber Ltd. sawmill co-manager Angus Woodman, a guy with an appropriate last name. We scale a bulldozed path to the summit of the mill's ever-growing pile of bark, or hog—cedar, mostly—in the middle of the log yard. Day and night, the mill keeps spitting it out into a 50,000-tonne heap. Standing on top, you get a 360-degree view of the mill, the yard and the partly denuded patchwork of mountainsides up and down the Columbia Valley. "You ever come up here to think?" I ask. "Yup," says Woodman with a chuckle. "Just to get away from it all." What Woodman would really like to get away from is this gunky, steaming pile of rotting bark. Like many managers of mid-size sawmills in B.C., he has no use for it. "Anything you try to do with it is fraught with problems," Woodman says. Same thing down the road at Stella- Jones Inc., which shaves and sizes cedar utility poles. People stop by to take samples of cedar bark in their own entrepreneurial efforts to figure out what to do with it. "Then we never hear from them again," says yard supervisor Pat McMechan, who just mailed four full Ziploc bags to somebody in Texas. Mills sell other wood waste: chips, sawdust and shavings. Those that pro- cess wood other than cedar can usually turn their hog into pellets or burn it for steam-powered electricity and/or heat. But as cedar bark grows, it picks up dirt and silica. In a boiler, it turns into chunky, caked-on lava. And because cedar bark is stringy, it doesn't feed easily into an auger. As for transforming it into pellet form, cedar is like a sponge that doesn't compress, Woodman says. the Whole hog NATURAl RESoURCES growing heaps of cedar bark have long left B.C. lumber producers stumped, but innovators are looking for ways to cash in on a trouble- some byproduct by Peter Worden barking mad Cedar waste, also called hog, is a head- ache for b.C. sawmills 18 BCBusiness ApRIL 2018