In culinary terms, it's called nose-to-tail.
It's the basis of traditional European cuisine and the cooking styles of most indigenous populations on Earth. If you're going to bother to hunt and slaughter an animal for food, then every single edible piece of the animal, from its nose to its tail, gets used somehow, some way.
It's the way of the wild, where nothing goes to waste when animals die, from the predators to the scavengers, right down to the insects that lay eggs inside carcasses so the hatchlings have something to eat when they're born.
Besides its historical basis, nose-to-tail cooking and eating also an environmentally responsible way to approach food. Liver, heart and tongue may inspire the gag reflex in the uninitiated urban eater but those parts of the animal are delicacies and high in nutritional value. Unlike their ancestors, however, most meat eaters in modern society refuse to eat much of the animal on their plate.
The opposite is happening in forestry, where up until a few recent years ago, forest companies made as much lumber and pulp as they could from the trees hauled out of the forest and then disposed of the rest, often by burning it. Today, however, the forestry equivalent of nose-to-tail cooking is tip-to base-logging, where every branch of the tree is used and every chunk of wood fibre has use, right down to the roots.
The challenge under this new model is introducing value where once there was none. Value equals dollars and forest companies with tenure rights in B.C., like most other businesses in most other sectors of the economy, aren't willing to leave cash on the table and let others get rich riding their coat tails.
That tension led to some memorable exchanges at the International Bioenergy Conference and Exhibition last week in Prince George.
Gordon Murray, the executive director of the Wood Pellet Association of Canada, complained that pellet plant operators are living a "hand-to-mouth" existence that discourages investment because of limited access to supply, both in quantity but also in terms of restrictive year-to-year agreements.
Conifex Timber CEO Ken Shields refused to buy-in to Murray's pity party.
"Your own association report says... that your industry wants 24 per cent of the fiber volume, but you want to pay only two per cent of the log costs," Shields said. "It is more economical for our industry to leave that fiber in the burn pile. Get the financial numbers up and you'll have lots of fiber."
In other words, the success of the bioenergy sector is wonderful, so long as the forest companies get a piece of the pie for supplying the ingredients. Just because there is no use for wood waste at the mill doesn't mean the forest companies want to just give the waste away when it clearly has commercial value.
Both sides agree that the provincial government needs to get involved and implement a system that will allow the bioenergy sector in B.C. to flourish while also giving forest companies the incentive to supply wood waste on a long-term basis.
That's one solution.
Another possible fix would be for the provincial government to encourage forest companies, through tax breaks and other regulatory incentives, to invest in the bioenergy sector directly. By doing so, the forest companies would have a financial incentive to keep the wood moving through the system, from the mills and then onto the energy providers.
Regardless of the solution, both sides need to profit.
Fortunately, the prospects are positive for both forest companies and bioenergy producers to benefit financially and environmentally from closer ties, all from seeing a log for its entire potential and not just as a sheet of plywood, a roll of paper or a stack of 2x4s.
Ultimately, those benefits will come to everyone, in terms of jobs, business and environmental sustainability, government revenues and smart harvesting of a public resource. The province needs to make more of a priority of getting these two sectors on the same page.
