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Brink says looking ahead is key
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By Ken MacInnis
Prince George Free Press staff writer
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John Brink is no stranger to low-grade wood.
Having established the first finger-jointing plant in Canada in 1975, his company, Brink Forest Products, has been turning rejected lumber from mills into high-demand products for years, and is the longest-surviving business of its kind in the country.
Almost 30 years after he started that first plant on River Road in Prince George, Brink, the company's president and CEO, is set to expand even further, after doubling the size of the Brink operation in the last 18 months.
The company has grown to 150 employees from the three who started with him. Construction has just finished on a third finger-jointing plant, and another is set to open in October. He also operates a re-manufacturing (the lingo is "reman") plant in Houston. |
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He expects the company's output to rise to nearly 180 million board feet, up from the current 80 million. "We're consistently growing," Brink said. "The business has been a challenge for the last 10 years, but we have been optimistic."
Brink has a history of finding the silver lining. Look at the business he's in, creating quality from rejected wood. About 15 to 20 percent of wood that comes through the area's major mills is too low-grade and defective to use in lumber. It's no good to the
mills. But Brink takes it and finger-joints - glues - smaller pieces together to create high-quality lumber. His reman plants also take that wood, removes the defects and creates smaller lengths.
He uses pine beetle wood in his plants, and expects the percentage of infested wood to increase. Not that he's a stranger to that either. "Twenty years ago, we had a plant in the middle of the Bowron region during the spruce bark beetle epidemic," Brink said. "We've been very much a part of that."
Brink's finger-jointed and reman products are sold to the general market, and appear in big box stores like Home Depot and Lowes, and in pre-fabricated housing all over North America. "In the Lower Mainland and Victoria, those products are used predominantly," he said. "It's the markets' product of choice."
As for the industry he works in and gets his wood from, Brink said there are major changes ahead. "In the next five years, most names we're familiar with will have disappeared," he said of the trend of mergers within the industry. "We're watching them with some concern," he said. "But I believe we are a very real part of the changing forest industry."
And he's seen it change before. "The magnitude of changes is the same if not more now than in the mid-60's," he said.
He said the public, as a stakeholder in the industry and of the forests, should become proactive in deciding the industry's future, and to look far ahead at its future. "What we must do is look forward together at what the industry must look like, not in five years, but in 10 or 50 or 100 years. That's how far we should look and decide what its makeup is an what returns to the people."
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