Quesnel's leader in value-added manufacturing
There are ways to preserve large expanses of untouched wilderness and have a healthy forest industry. But it requires hard work, dedication and sacrifice, exactly the qualities that Joe Cerasa has in abundance.
At a time when B.C.'s sawmills and pulp and paper mills are churning through 20 percent more wood fibre than they can hope to in the long run, Cerasa is showing it's possible to do more with less.
Cerasa owns and operates a value-added wood products plant in Quesnel specializing in paneling and edge-glued furniture components. He currently employs 56 people, small by the standards of the giant sawmills in town.
But Cerasa has ambitious plans. He wants to expand his workforce by 140. And, if all goes according to plan, he will employ 200 workers in the next two years. And each job in his newly-expanded plant will require only 550 cubic metres of logs per year.
Contrast that with the big mills in town where huge amounts of commodity lumber are produced at dizzying speeds. Those companies need 6.5 times the amount of logs Cerasa needs to employ one sawmill worker.
In other words, Cerasa will be able to maintain one job for every 15 logging truckloads of wood he processes while big, conventional sawmills require 102 truckloads of logs to keep one worker employed.
Doing more with less is Joe Cerasa's creed, says Paul George, a director with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee. And it's a creed others in the industry should be looking at.
"He's making a good quality product, and it's a step beyond our (two-by-four) mills, a big step. We must do more of this here in B.C. and reduce the amount of wood going through the big robot-run mills," George says.
There is a looming timber shortage in Quesnel, as clearly demonstrated in a special report entitled "A Review of Major Trends Affecting Forest Industry Employment in the Quesnel Forest District". (Copies can be obtained by writing the North Community Futures office at P.O. Box 4706 in Quesnel.) The report chronicles how an excessively high cut in the region's forests has led to a situation where the annual tree harvest must now be scaled back 1.5 million cubic metres a year.
Trouble is, the big sawmills in town are used to churning through more logs than the local forests can continue to supply. Clearly, the report indicates, current industrial activity is out of whack with sustainability and as a result, Quesnel is "entering a period of difficult transition."
Elsewhere in B.C., only the numbers change.
Today, the province's sawmills, pulpmills, panelboard and plywood mills, are consuming a staggering 90 million cubic metres of logs a year, 20 percent more wood than the 75 million cubic metres B.C.'s Ministry of Forests says should be coming out of our forests. What's more, University of B.C. professor and industry spokesperson Les Reed estimates, those same mills now have the ability to consume 100 million cubic metres a year.
...Cerasa will be able to maintain one job for every 15 logging truckloads of wood he processes while big, conventional sawmills require 102 truckloads of logs to keep one worker employed.
Any wonder, then, that B.C.'s forest industry says, in an industry-wide position paper to B.C.'s Forest Resources Commission, that it needs a dedicated land base of 30 million hectares of commercial forest land on which to base its operations, an amount that exceeds even the Ministry of Forests' own estimates of what is currently economically accessible and available to industry by 4 million hectares?
An industry-built "overcapacity" poses clear problems not only to forest industry workers in B.C., but to the mainstream environmental movement that wants to preserve large representative samples of old-growth forests throughout the province and complete the park systems so that all the province's diverse ecosystems are protected.
But people like Joe Cerasa are showing the way: there is a middle ground where perhaps all can meet.
Cerasa's company, C & C Wood Products, uses small diameter lodgepole pine trees almost exclusively, trees that until recently weren't used much at all by the big forest companies in town - Weldwood of Canada Ltd., West Fraser Mills, and Slocan Forest Products Ltd.
About 15 years ago, Cerasa decided he could do something with the smaller trees if he could dry them to a point where their lumber could be used for interior paneling and furniture.
"At 19 percent moisture content, pine's not suitable for interior use. So, we decided to dry it to 12 percent and below and of course then that would open up new doors - it would mean it could be classified as a finishing-type lumber," Cerasa says.
From that simple idea, a business was born. C & C began making interior tongue-and-groove pine paneling, selling it in shrink-wrapped packages to large retailers like Beaver Lumber and others.
In 1985, the company opened a new $3-million facility, and a year later began making edge-glued boards of various widths and thickness for shelving.
But in 1988 the company shut down the edge-gluing operation after it became apparent that it could not get enough wood to sustain both operations.
That changed last year, however, when the company was awarded a five-year supply of 79,000 cubic metres of wood a year under the MOF's small business forest enterprise program.
C & C received a second two-year temporary forest license allowing it to cut an additional 30,000 cubic metres of wood a year, meaning for the next two years at least it will have 110,000 cubic metres of wood a year to work with.
While good in providing new jobs, this increase in the annual harvest involves additional non-sustainable clearcutting logging practices. Environmentalists want a rapid change-over to sustainable, partial cutting systems to accompany a switch-over to higher value-added manufacturing.
Cerasa says his company hopes to employ a lot more workers in edge-gluing given its new security of wood supply.
"Initially, we were only making boards. Now we want to get into more finished products, providing furniture makers with their needs, giving them pre-cut components," he says.
If Cerasa is able to pull it off - bring his total workforce to 200 - he will be employing one in 12 forest industry workers in Quesnel. And doing an awful lot for the local economy without using a huge whack of wood.
Cerasa says those kinds of numbers highlight the benefit of value-added production - more jobs with less wood. But he stresses it would be impudent to conclude on the basis of C & C's experience that some big primary mills aren't needed.
The secondary manufacturing business is a niche industry," he says. "You can't take a business (like a sawmill) that has existed for many years and say you've done this, now you're going to do that. Secondly, we can't all do the same thing. The secondary manufacturer is not going to solve all of the problems we have. But it will expand because everyone realizes we need to do more with the wood."
