As wildfires burn through BC forests, a First Nation is demonstrating what can be done with any damaged or leftover wood by turning it into biodegradable packaging and building insulation.
Reg Ogen, a Wet’suwet’en leader who has been hearing helicopters over his Penticton home as crews fight a major wildfire near Summerland, said this latest disaster points to a larger supply of damaged wood across BC that could be put to use.
The idea first came from Wet’suwet’en Elders who questioned why forestry companies left wood waste behind after logging, said Ogen, president and CEO of Yinka Dene Economic Development Limited Partnership, the business arm of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation.
“Our elders saw big piles of brush being burned in the bush and wondered why the licensees never took it out of the bush and utilized it,” Ogen said. “Our purpose was to do something with the garbage wood after the major licensees left it behind.”
That vision has become DicinFoam, a biodegradable material named after “dicin,” the Wet’suwet’en word for wood. Developed through a partnership between UBC and Wet’suwet’en, DicinFoam is made from waste wood and other fibres, including logging scraps, bark, sawdust, recycled cardboard and fire-damaged wood. The material can be moulded into packaging to replace Styrofoam-style blocks, while a denser version is being tested as building insulation.
The project has received about $4 million in government and institutional support, including $1.6 million from Natural Resources Canada’s Investments in Forest Industry Transformation program. The federal program helps move new forest-sector technologies from development toward commercial use, with a focus on lower-carbon products, better use of wood fibre and new revenue streams for the sector.
The company’s recently opened pilot plant in Vancouver is now being used to refine the foam and produce enough material for potential customers to test.
The project began after Ogen met Feng Jiang, a UBC forestry professor, at a Vancouver bioeconomy conference. Jiang’s lab was researching ways to turn underused forest biomass into higher-value materials, including wood-based foam that could reduce pollution from conventional packaging foam. The wood-based foam is designed to break down in soil within weeks or months, depending on the product and conditions.
But the challenge, Jiang said, was moving it from lab samples to pilot-scale production.
“Most lab research does not end up in commercialization or pilot scale,” Jiang said. “This is a totally different story.”
From lab to market
A foam sample that works in a lab does not automatically hold up when it is scaled into larger blocks that must be strong, consistent and useful for customers, he said. The pilot plant now produces about 100 to 200 kilograms of foam a day. The company is working with potential packaging customers and has a waitlist for its insulation product, which is still being refined for Canadian building standards.
The wood foam insulation is designed for above-ground walls, not places exposed to standing water or constant moisture, said Richard Chen, CEO of Plantee. Plantee is a wood-based construction materials company that shares the Vancouver site where DicinFoam is made and is helping the project move toward larger production. In wetter applications, plastic foam such as polystyrene may still perform better than DicinFoam, Chen said. But in wall systems, the material is designed to perform comparably, while allowing water vapour to pass through, which can help reduce moisture buildup.
He added the amount of unused wood fibre available in BC is far larger than one pilot plant can handle. “There’s so much that’s being thrown away,” Chen said. “What we’re doing is a very, very tiny mist in an ocean.”
Chen said DicinFoam initially looked at pine beetle-killed wood because vast areas of forest in BC had been damaged by the mountain pine beetle, leaving behind dead timber with limited commercial value.
Much of that material has since broken down in the forest or is too costly to collect, but as the technology developed, the team found it could use many other kinds of feedstock, including branches, bark, sawdust, recycled cardboard, paper and pulp sludge.
Turning waste into revenue
For Ogen, the project is also about building an Indigenous-led forestry business in a sector his nation has long struggled to enter. The Wet’suwet’en First Nation tried for decades to gain a stronger foothold in forestry, but Ogen said it did not hold the kind of forest licence that would let it compete with major tenure holders.
That struggle reflects a broader history in BC, where forest rights were concentrated among large companies for much of the 20th century, leaving many First Nations with little control over logging on their territories or the wealth it generated. In 1991, First Nations held less than one per cent of BC’s logging tenure, while the province’s 10 largest companies controlled almost 70 per cent.
Today, First Nations have access to over 22 per cent of BC’s annual allowable cut, according to BC Forests Minister Ravi Parmar.
“We’ve been kind of left behind in the economics,” Ogen said. “This is a great opportunity to generate revenue for the things we need in our community.”
The next planned step is a larger facility in Burns Lake, within Wet’suwet’en territory, with capacity to produce about 1,000 tonnes a year. If the project scales, it could create jobs gathering fibre, running equipment, manufacturing products and building local supply chains.
Ogen pointed to the wildfire near Summerland as one example of the damaged fibre available across Canada, where 585 wildfires were active as of Aug. 18. But he said hauling low-value, burned wood long distances to Vancouver would be too expensive. Instead, he sees the bigger opportunity in regional plants built closer to local fibre sources.
“It’s not only in Vancouver or in the north or on the island. It’s everywhere,” he said. “There’s an opportunity for other Indigenous groups to participate.”
Yeling Zhu, DicinFoam’s chief technology officer, said the project is guided by the idea of using as much of each tree as possible. When trees are harvested, about 30 per cent of the biomass can go unused, including branches, bark and other fibre that is often left in the forest or burned.
Zhu said the Indigenous principle behind the project reminded him of using every part of a fish — including the bones, flesh and other parts that might otherwise be discarded — and applying that same thinking to a tree.
“We want to improve the utilization of a tree,” Zhu said. “We don’t want to have anything behind.”
Sonal Gupta / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer.
By Sonal Gupta, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on Aug 20, 2026 at 14:43
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