SEE RELATED STORY: SHANGHAI WOOD
One construction company in China has made a business gesture to British Columbia that could change the face of our entire wood industry.
Prince George-Mackenzie MLA Pat Bell, the provincial Minister of Forests, is in China now as part of a major trade mission dedicated to wood products. The Canadians met with a development company there called Green Land which is not accidentally named; their business focus is construction with sustainable materials and practices. When B.C. first brought wood into the Chinese construction market, it was a pilot project with Green Land a few years ago.
"They were very resistant to using wood, they weren't really interested. We paid for most of the pilot project with them so they would get familiar with how it worked," Bell told The Citizen on Sunday. "As a result of that, they as a company have decided to do as much of the low-rise construction as they can out of wood frame. To that end, they told us they would start construction on a Kindergarten very shortly that will be all wood frame, and from now on, as they build any low-rise buildings, it will be focused on wood frame. This is a huge breakthrough."
There were some practical issues raised by Green Land, said Bell, but they are tantalizingly resolvable.
One is establishing an expanded fire code for using lumber in the construction of interior partition/in-fill walls in skyscrapers. So far the fire code is only established for buildings up to 18 stories tall and they would like a safety protocol designed for buildings 30 to 33 floors tall.
A second issue is the need for a lot of glue lams (long engineered wood beams almost as strong a steel). B.C. expertise will likely be committed, said Bell, to help them set up glue lam factories in China.
The third is one of those "oh if we truly must" concerns. The Chinese company wants to have supply and delivery assurances for, oh, about a billion board feet of our lumber.
"To give you a sense of what Green Land does, in an average year they build a combination of residential and commercial space the equivalent of 300,000 housing units," said Bell. "The entire United States will build about 500,000 housing units this year. Green Land's projections are for doing $21 billion Cdn in business in 2011; the entire British Columbia economy is just over $200 billion. This is a mammoth company. This is the type of company that, with the single stroke of the pen, can have the type of impact on our forest industry almost no one else in the world can have."
Which means with another stroke of the pen, they can cease to buy wood from B.C. Bell said he was cognizant of that, which is why this trade mission has visits scheduled with 35 or 40 other companies in China also looking for B.C. wood.
It also turns the B.C. wood industry away from the "single player" scenario Canada has been used to dealing with, the United States. Even in the past weeks the U.S. lumber lobby has been making protectionist maneuvers over Canadian imports.
"Wouldn't it be nice to not have those discussions anymore? When you change the paradigm of where the lumber goes, it changes the tone of the discussions," said Bell. "This is my fourth trip as forests minister. The Chinese seem to have gotten religion on having a low-carbon economy and reducing their emissions. That clearly drives you towards building with wood. The first three trips seemed like information trips, and now it seems like a sales trip. We were pushing and now we are pulling together."
Bell said this was by far the longest lumber junket to China: 10 days on the ground instead of four. He said he was on track to meet or even exceed his prediction of selling more than 4 billion board feet into China by the end of 2011 (we are projected to sell 2.5 billion this year), and a big part of that fibre is coming from mills in Prince George and Mackenzie.
"This trip will turn into some very real sales by the end of the trip, I can guarantee you that," he said.
