The lost opportunities in the current practice of creating and burning large roadside logging residue piles raises the question as to the appropriateness of this practice.

Logging residue-opportunities lost discusses the issue and provides an opinion regarding the argument of maintaining the status quo.

The Kitimat Mayor is encouraging Canada through an open letter to Governments and Canadians (kitimat-mayor-an-open-letter-to-canada) to increase value added manuracturing. The forest sector in identified as one of the natural resource industries being challenged to take action. Increasing value-added or secondary wood manufacturing  then BC is not new. Actions have been taken for over several decades on this issue with limited success.  The most recent is the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations’  mflnro-competiveness-agenda and companion value-added-sector-action-plan. Both of these documents address issues related to markets and other support services but they do not mention the major factor of certainty of wood supply which has been identified as a major barrier for many manufacturers.  The MFLNRO Fibre Working Group is supposed to be working on this through creating regulations to encourage “business to business” opportunities.  However, it is yet to be shown this approach will work when there is a disparity of interest and control between the parties.  Hopefully, this will be resolved but until then, the identified priority issue of communities to diversify their local forest sector will be limited at best.

Policy – September 2015 Encouraging use of wood residue https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2015FLNR0285-001530

MFLNRO announces a new fibre action plan to increase use of wood residue.

New Forest Investment Models Needed
Bill Bourgeois, Healthy Forests Healthy Communities