Wood scientist helps build industry.

An award-winning Lakehead University wood scientist is lending his expertise to industry to help grow the next generation of forest products entrepreneurs.

Dr. Mathew Leitch is heading up a team of faculty and students in revitalizing Lakehead's wood science department by helping companies transition into value-added projects.

With mill closures and waves of job losses devastating northwestern Ontario's economy, Leitch wants to take the forestry industry light years beyond the traditional two-by-four commodity market.

Since arriving in Thunder Bay three years ago from Australia, the Midland, Ont.-born Leitch has been building contacts in the business community to help guide the shift into the value-added sector.

Working out of Lakehead's Wood Science Testing Facility, Leitch works as a consultant to companies in testing wood, wood products and proprietary new technologies as an independent, third party.

The lab has been doing mechanical property testing for small start-ups and some large companies like Bowater for years, examining the strength properties of logs from their plantations.

Leitch says many small firms are getting into value-added flooring, decking and docking using underutilized wood like tamarack, birch, black ash and poplar, species long regarded by lumber companies as low-value wood.

Not much is known of these species and their properties, and small businesses don't have the money to finance that kind of R & D work.

On his universal testing machine, Leitch can measure wood strength and hardness as well as perform nail and screw pulls in determining the best end-use products.

Wood testing is part of Lakehead's overall plan to expand their research capacity and provide some practical experience for his undergraduate and post-grads students in working with industry.

In two years, Leitch has secured more than $400,000 in funding from agencies like FedNor and Living Legacy Trust to upgrade the lab with equipment purchases and he's going for more.

His years of research was recognized in October, when Leitch was the recipient of the James M. Kitz Award by the Canadian Institute of Forestry.

At the University of Melbourne, where Leitch worked on his doctorate, he studied how trees make wood under different conditions and even tinkered with modifying their genetics.

Leitch says by measuring properties throughout an individual log, certain qualities can be identified in selecting potential marketable products.

"If we get that mindset of segregation within a log, we'll get better recovery and much better utilization of our forests and create the highest value products out of one tree.

"Typically we think the whole tree is the same--that there's only two-by-fours out of a tree--and that's not really the right way to go."

On one project, Leitch tested black spruce for a First Nations groups in the Dryden-Red Lake area who are developing new value-added forestry opportunities for a potential Pacific Rim market.

Leitch says their Japanese clients were not convinced black spruce held the same strength properties as jack pine. By testing area mill logs at Lakehead, they convinced the Japanese that slower growing spruce from the boreal forest is an equally high quality wood.

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"That's all it took," says Leitch, "that bit of testing to convince them. The wood we have display the properties that they wanted to see."

Another collaboration is with an innovative value-added producer, Thunder Bay's Superior Thermowood. They are developing a high-temperature kiln unit to cook wood at their testing facility outside Thunder Bay.

Originally pioneered in Finland, the company has "North Americanized the technology," says company CFO Ed Rose, to use underutilized species thanks to some "tweaking" in the control process.

In measuring batches of wood out of the kiln, Leitch answered some technical questions on what happens to wood properties during the process and offered insight on what products to make.

"I don't think this project would be possible without that kind of knowledge and background working with us," says Rose.

"Mat helped us immensely from the beginning in determining how to improve the technology to hit the performance targets we were looking for."

Leitch wants to keep building on those partnership projects.

Lakehead is finalizing partnership plans with a major Canadian research institute to expand the organization's presence in central Canada.

"Long term, we want to be recognized as a centre of excellence in the wood science and wood products area," says Leitch, by adding faculty, attracting visiting scientists and employing marketing specialists to assist companies with products. "Thunder Bay is an obvious place."

Leitch says this kind of industry work can be a revenue generator for the university.

Though he acknowledges that it's easier these days to secure grant money for commercially-oriented work rather than pure academic research, Leitch says it's a "shortsighted" policy to promote a value-added economy without having a basic foundation of scientific knowledge.

"The information we've collected about trees over the years is great information for the commodity industry, but not to maximize a value-adding industry. We need more in-depth information especially on under-valued species of which there is very little."

By IAN ROSS

Northern Ontario Business