Scaling Mass Timber: Debunking Commoditization & Capacity Misconceptions w/Nordic Structures

Jean-Marc Dubois, the Director of Business Development at Nordic Structures, a leading mass timber manufacturer with the first commercial cross laminated timber (CLT) plant in North America, shares his expert opinion on industry challenges, sustainability practices, and the future of building with engineered wood

Jean-Marc argues that while consistent design and production have benefits, complete commoditization of cross-laminated timber (CLT) is inappropriate due to variations in wood species, geographical factors, and the need to optimize resource usage based on specific wood characteristics. Nordic sets itself apart by offering a comprehensive package beyond just CLT and glulam, including design-assist services, transparent pricing, and a focus on large-scale projects.

Dubois notes that North America's CLT production capacity is strong, but industry absorption is inconsistent due to project delays impacting manufacturers' schedules and cash flow, necessitating a more stable project pipeline. He advocates focusing on workforce housing and mid-rise structures rather than solely on tall buildings and highlights the role of carbon pricing in mass timber’s growth.

Dubois stresses the importance of project stability to ensure industry growth and long-term viability.

Connect with Jean-Marc on LinkedIn

Lean more about Nordic Structures

Email Jean-Marc at: jean-marc.dubois@nordic.ca

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Chapters

• 0:00 Mass Timber Industry Perspectives
• 9:33 Nordic's Unique Timber Product Approach
• 16:38 Capacity and Efficiency in Mass Timber
• 32:33 Addressing Project Slippage in Mass Timber
• 42:44 Creating a Sustainable Business Model

Transcript

Jean-Marc: 0:00

I tend to hear from designers, primarily right the design community, that they can't get product when they need it. And you know, honestly, I haven't seen other than a handful of projects a year that actually deliver on the predicated contract time that we have to deliver. And you've only got a finite amount of production time available at a plant, right? No one is producing spaghetti at their plant. The way the industry is set up, that's what the intent is and everyone does their what-if scenario. And they talk about their potential volume predicated on at least two shifts of continued production.

Brady: 0:57

This is the Mass Timber Group Show. I'm Brady, and today I caught up with Jean-Marc Dubois, the Director of Business Development at Nordic Structures. Jean-marc has spent his career working to provide sustainable building solutions, and Nordic is the largest privately held engineered wood product manufacturer, with the first commercial CLT plant in North America. To date they've completed over 3,000 projects. We peel back several conversation topics surrounding mass timber in this podcast, including commoditization, questions around capacity and where the industry should be focused moving forward. If you like these podcasts, subscribing to the channel is the biggest compliment you can give us. So with that, let's get into it. There's a lot of talk in the industry about we either need to go to a more commoditized CLT route or people advocate for focusing on these custom projects. What's your take on that conversation?

Jean-Marc: 1:43

I think there's two ways to view commoditization right. The idea of utilizing consistent and uniform design and delivering consistent and uniform product to market is a large part of the potential for mass timber. That being said, you cannot necessarily expect every manufacturer to fit within one framework. There's a number of distinctions that happen in mass timber. First of all, speciation. Not every raw material in every market is mutable from one market to another, right, so design properties are distinct. Doug Fir and Bruce or our Black Spruce tend to be very close in performance, and so you can get design values that are similar with a spruce glulam, for instance, a 24F glulam to a Doug fir glulam, and then you'll have similar proximity within the species you know, southern yellow pine or others. Right, so that in and of itself, I think, allows for a certain amount of commoditization, others, right. So that in and of itself, I think, allows for a certain amount of commoditization. But the difference between, maybe, southern Spruce or Southern Yellow Pine and Doug Fir regular SPF tend to create distinctions, right. So you can't just have one size fits all Manufacturing of raw material based on dimension. Lumber, that's great if that's the only source you're doing or the only source that you're utilizing, but it does create a dynamic where you're not necessarily able to extract the best value of the product predicated on the material that you're harvesting, and I think it forces everyone downstream into when you do commoditize. It reduces your ability to extract value. For instance, if it makes sense for me to saw two by five, for instance, which is not a commodity product and it's not available in the open market and I don't because I have to be the same dimensionality as all the other manufacturers I'm limiting myself and it's not good for the resources. I think it's a waste of resource. So every manufacturer who's vertically integrated, like Nordic and I think that's a distinction that we have, because we are sawing our own raw material we can actually optimize our product and we can make better use of the resource.

Jean-Marc: 4:00

So commoditization in and of itself, while it's not necessarily a bad thing, I don't think it's really appropriate. Based on the multiplicity of species, the broad swath of geography, that we have different growing conditions, climates and ecosystems, that we have A boreal forest and a temperate rainforest like we have out west, or a southern yellow pine, will generate completely different types of growth patterns, and commoditization I think is not possible if you're going to be respectful of the value of that raw material in and of itself. Like I said, there's also transportation distinctions. Logistics change, right, you have some mills that are making 12-foot wide panels, you have others that are making 8-foot or narrower than 8-foot. And if you do commoditize and you design for all that, then you preclude the Europeans from being able to load containers and ship material over here competitively. That's not really an advantage to anyone, because we need to have more growth, more utilization of mass timber. You know as an industry, right, we need to be able to utilize the product.

Brady: 5:09

For going out of this commoditization side of the conversation, I think one of the things that becomes really important is being able to work with a manufacturer to take advantage of what they're putting out based on their inputs. Right, and so how do manufacturers, but specifically Nordic, do that? How are you working with the design and build teams to make sure that they're aware of all the different nuances and intricacies of your guys' products?

Jean-Marc: 5:27

Well, we're pretty transparent. We do keep a very good library of products on our website. Not everyone wants to do the deep dive. Right plane at the outset is that you know this is designed to give you the most ability to go out and get multiple sources of supplies so that you can guarantee that the project is going to advance, that your budget is sound and that your pro forma is going to work.

Jean-Marc: 5:57

Now, that being said, because Nordic is sawing their own material, we may have a different cross-section that could be more efficient in terms of production or logistics. We may be able to provide an advantage that, even though everything is exactly equal, there may be an advantage on the installation side. We may have a longer panel that creates less picks, therefore feeds up the installation time. So there's things like that, and it's our job as a manufacturer and as a design assist partner, by virtue of the way we operate, to help identify those areas early on, so that we can not necessarily drive the dialogue, but make people aware of it. And then, when it comes time to de-scope and they're looking at, making comparisons, they're doing it with as much information as possible and they're making good decisions. It doesn't mean we win every project, obviously, but a few of the areas can be product-specific that tend to distinguish Nordic overall.

Brady: 6:57

It's much more than just a product. You're not just buying glulam or CLT, you're buying all of the wraparound support that comes with it. Am I getting that right?

Jean-Marc: 7:06

You're exactly right. Yeah, I mean it could go further than that. I mean our whole premise is you know our company, even though we're a manufacturer or we're vertically integrated, we're really engineering driven, we're design driven and our leadership has always been focused on making sure that, because that leadership came from the heavy construction industry, that they know the dynamics of what motivates the GC and the client and the designer partners, right, the architect and the engineer to try and help make an efficient structure, an efficient job site, et cetera. So when we look at projects, we're looking all the way downstream to logistics limitations, right, site constraints, how are we going to address this? We don't just look at a set of plans and quote the material. We look at everything because we're trying to think of how, if we get this job, how we're going to actually execute it.

Jean-Marc: 8:00

So I think there's layers of complexity with that, but it really helps inform the dialogue. Unfortunately, we don't always get to talk to the people that are making those decisions, because the first step is usually talking to an estimator. You know the finished product is. You know everyone else in upstream is looking for, they're looking for the easy answer and and sometimes we have to kind of make our pain of ourselves by asking and qualifying more, uh, more deeply right. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't, but you know, overall I think that people understand that we're trying to help them and, and you know, advance that, uh, the positives of, and advance that deposit of the project.

Brady: 8:47

Yeah, and it's such a I'm going to use quotes like new industry here, If you're looking at construction as an entire history, but there are some. So you have all the wraparound services that support getting these projects in the ground. You're working with the teams behind it, but there are some product nuances that differ from manufacturer to manufacturer, and I wanted to talk about, like the species and the grade that you guys produce and how that's different than things that we might see in the U S South or the U S West coast. You mentioned black spruce. Like we have black spruce that grows in the States, but they grow in different climates, right? So just because one trees of black spruce here and one's a black spruce here does not mean that they have the same characteristics. Can you unpack for me what that means for your guys' products? Sure, sure.

Jean-Marc: 9:30

Absolutely, and it's a great question. Even within Canada, the black spruce that grows in the areas in Southern Quebec has different design values than the area that we're harvesting. So if you think of the continent as a whole, there's an east-west continental divide, right. So the Rockies water flows west to the Pacific and flows east, eventually out to the Atlantic. There's a north-south continental divide that people don't talk about and we're on the north side of that and it has a very specific growth cycle and climate, and so you're looking at about a 50-day growing season and that 50-day growing season means that you've got small trees that are looking for sunlight. They don't get very, very much, so they're pushing high as much as possible and they don't grow very, very well. So that density is really what distinguishes the black spruce that we have, and fully 85% of the fiber that we're harvesting is mechanically stress-rateable over 1950 MSR. So that's a really high value and that's what allows us to be equivalent to dub fir on the West Coast a 24F with a tree that grows for 500 plus years. Right, I mean you can get dub firs that are over 1,000 years old for 500 plus years, right, I mean you can get those firs that are over a thousand years old. So here we've got a long rotation crop of 80 years where it achieves peak maturity and we've got about a 40 year window to extract it, versus a legacy tree that can continue to encapsulate carbon over time and every year that it does, it gets bigger and encapsulates more and more and more. And yet we've been harvesting that to make dimensional lumber.

Jean-Marc: 11:07

Well, here we're taking trees that people don't even think are valid, right, they typically make fencing and strips and cribbing and that kind of thing, and we're taking that fiber and extracting the best and highest use out of it. So that's the focus and the singular vision of our company is to elevate that product. So when you get further south, you're getting a lower density spruce, and that's why at the 49th parallel, you go from SPF to SPFS and SPFS has lower design values. So getting a 24F glulam out of that product is not going to happen. You're going to get a 20F product. So now you've got a distinction right. You've got about a 10% delta in the fiber strength rating of those products and that means deeper beams, wider beams for the same overall load that you're talking about. So that allows us to, you know, basically give an equivalent dimension and cross section to a Doug for element, and we're doing it with a product that's as light as that. So that has logistics consequences.

Jean-Marc: 12:20

That has screw carrying, you know, connection, detail, impact, etc. Right, so I might be able to use an eight-millimeter diameter screw versus a 10-millimeter screw, and if you have 200,000 screws on a job and there's 50 cents of screw difference, well, that's a pretty significant budgetary impact, right? So little things like that can have a huge impact and that's why just quoting a price on CLT or glulam is of no interest to us. We want to quote the package because we want it to be very clear and concise, that what we're offering, you don't have to add anything else to it. Right, that this is the delivered package for the core and shell and we've got the design assist services to provide that, with our backup team in our Montreal office services to provide that with our backup team in our Montreal office.

Brady: 13:16

How much or how many? What portion of your client conversations, when people are coming to you and they're saying, hey, we want to use or consider Nordic's products, how many of those conversations come out and just say, hey, just bid the CLT and Glulam, or do they come to you for that whole package? How do you convey that message to people that are only shopping for the two products?

Jean-Marc: 13:35

Initially. I mean we're seeing more and more people just asking us for a price for CLT and glulam and basically we've been having the same conversation for 15 years. That's not the way we price. We don't have a one-size-fits-all approach to the market and we quote projects and so we may have ways to gain efficiency and drive a better project price, predicated on our approach and our interpretation of the way the project is going to get built and therefore listen. I think they understand that Nordic's approach is a little bit different than virtually everyone else's and if they have the patience to listen and we have the ability to inform them, then we can have a good informed dialogue. Inform them, then we can have a good informed dialogue.

Jean-Marc: 14:33

And again, it doesn't mean that they're going to go that way right.

Jean-Marc: 14:34

I mean, there's always competition and there's always different nuances.

Jean-Marc: 14:39

There may be a motivating factor that will cause someone to go in a different direction, but the fact that we've been able to deliver thousands of projects all over North America from the West Coast from the West Coast, you know, southern California we're getting down into Orange County out of Quebec and we're going all the way up to the Arctic Circle on some projects, and you know, we covered down to the Gulf and we put projects into the Caribbean.

Jean-Marc: 15:08

I think that indicates that there's a willingness of people to engage in that conversation and part of it, I think, is giving them a comfort level in that you know, as they're, whether it's a GC or a direct client that we're working with, that we help de-risk that process, right, because you know they're not looking for oh, this part was missed, and you know we're very transparent about everything that we provide, right. So it helps create an informed dialogue and it makes them a better customer in the process. It may not get us the order, but it will definitely make sure that their needs are covered when they're talking to other people.

Brady: 15:50

So you mentioned having you know east to west coast coverage, arctic Circle down to the Caribbean. There's another conversation topic in the mass timber world where it talks about hey, if you're shipping materials across that broad of a range, how sustainable is that really? What's your response? Great?

Jean-Marc: 16:08

question. Great question. Well, it all depends on how you move the product and what you do with it, right? So if you're building efficient structures and you're using it to the best of your ability, first and foremost, that should be good. Right, we're harvesting product from a pretty wide swath of forest land in Northern Quebec, but we're transforming it and we're providing it all the way through to the finished detailed product. Normally, if you're trying to move a product across the country, if there's a supplier that's in the backyard of the project, chances are he's going to have a huge advantage freight-wise over you.

Jean-Marc: 16:54

Fortunately for us, we've been doing engineered wood products and dimension lumber products as part of our overall product mix for the better part of 60 plus years. Right, we're a 63-year-old company, so we have a lot of logistics experience, and part of that is our ability to ship by rail. We were the first we really pioneered rail shipment of cross. You can't do that by truck, so the further we go and it becomes a question of scale, right, I can't do that for a small project, and that's one of the reasons that Nordic doesn't really focus on single family homes or small boutique projects. We tend to look at larger projects where there is an efficiency that's gained by the scale of the project and it may warrant the ability to be able to ship by rail. So we've done that and we've developed relationships with transload facilities and local transporters to be able to service job sites, and that has a huge impact. So it actually helps reduce the global warming potential of the transportation, it reduces fossil fuel use and it creates a very efficient throughput on the project.

Brady: 18:33

Another part of the conversation for supplying projects all across the Western Hemisphere. Maybe North America is the appropriate term there. If you're shipping products down to SoCal or the East Coast or down to the Caribbean, like you said, if there's a plant in somebody's backyard they might have a logistical advantage there. But if you're supplying projects to all these different parts of the region, what does that say about the capacity for CLT production in North America? Because there's a lot of talk, there's a lot of buzz about how much capacity the industry has, whether we're going to meet or exceed it. There's lots of plants coming online. You've got European folks importing or plans to set up production facilities here. What's the capacity conversation right now and how are you guys approaching?

Jean-Marc: 19:13

that it's interesting that people I tend to hear from designers primarily the design community that they can't get product when they need it. And, honestly, I haven't seen a handful of projects other than a handful of projects a year that actually deliver on the predicated contract time that we have to deliver. And you've only got a finite amount of production time available at a plant. Right, we have 200 working days a year. We have two or three shifts. I mean you can make X amount of panels and go With. That being said, no one is producing spaghetti at their plant. The way the industry is set up, that's what the intent is and everyone does their what-if scenario and they talk about their potential volume predicated on at least two shifts of continued production. And in the 15 years that we've been doing this with CLT and the years prior that we were doing it with glulam projects and laminated deck projects, we have not fulfilled the minimum requirement for full utilization in our plant. And it's not because we don't have the capacity. We have the capacity the way the construction industry is set up. It's just we're victims to project slide. You know, when you have a construction delay, there's only so much storage that you can have at a plant, there's only so much material that you can make in advance and there's only so much cash flow you can have if you're a fabricator to acquiring material and putting it in until you get paid, right. So if the project slips by a couple of weeks, that's not a big deal. But a project slips by six months or a year and you've predicated your production time to that, all of a sudden you're out. Unless you can fill that rapidly, you've got no way of generating that cashflow. And I can't imagine being a fabricator that's just gotten into the industry and he's built his order file and all of a sudden he has a major project that slides by six months or a year and he can't generate enough cashflow to keep his employees on the payroll right Because you don't want to go to the bank and borrow at 8% interest to make payroll right. So if the industry was able to take the product as it was being manufactured and utilized, as the intent is and it's not malicious, it's just an economic reality. Right, an order slides, it's not malicious, it's just an economic reality. Right, an order slides. An order slides and it can slide for a variety of reasons. Right, it could be a project problem, it could be a financing problem, it could be any number of things weather-related, but all these impacts, they have a downstream effect on the manufacturer.

Jean-Marc: 22:10

But I can tell you there's way more capacity in North America right now than the ability of the industry to take it on a consistent basis right. So it should be that way. We should be ramping up and there should be more production coming on stream, but the takeaway just doesn't exist. I mean, ideally it would right. There's a lot of people what if-ing and throwing stuff at the dark board and saying I could do this with X, but it just doesn't happen. I've never seen it right. And so between North America and Europe there's plenty of capacity and as long as it's done sustainably, ultimately I think we were okay. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't be looking at opportunities to put a facility in, but the guaranteed takeaway is the critical part.

Brady: 22:59

Do you think that that capacity conversation whether it's coming from designers or other folks on the team because, like you said, like you're not looking for those smaller projects where you can't get that efficiency of scale Do you think that that makes a use case for certain types of manufacturers, like focusing on those types of smaller projects right where you can't get that efficiency of scale? Do you think that that makes a use case for certain types of manufacturers, like focusing on those types of smaller projects and certain manufacturers focusing on the big ones and there's like two different markets there. Or do you see the CLT production as kind of like one holistic beast?

Jean-Marc: 23:23

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think if you hadn't asked the question the way you did, I would have had a completely different answer. I think you know we don't necessarily look at small projects, but we have partners that are geared towards that and that have the capacity to fill our equipment and design product, and so we do have a downstream capability there. Right, I'm talking, you know, there's Nordic specific, but then there's our corporate structure with manufacturing, the partners that we engage with that can't fabricate but that can design and utilize that, and so we do. And even with that that's the point Even with that, those guys are providing the smaller scale, higher level of detail, architecturally demanding projects that maybe don't scale up to the effect when you're looking at an office building or a large academic structure, and so that is a positive.

Jean-Marc: 24:21

It may very well be that if there's a community scale manufacturer that has a local resource and a guaranteed takeaway for residential housing for instance and it could be small-scale, it could be cabins, it could be small-scale multi-res there's a huge demand for workforce housing and it definitely would make a lot of sense. For that Question is does it go to new manufacturing or does it go to someone who's going to do the design work and allow the manufacturers to extract that throughput and make the spaghetti and get it out to the market right? I think that's a really, really appropriate question.

Brady: 25:06

I have a follow-up for you on those different types of projects that are being, you know, from large to small and different office versus multifamily, et cetera. Do you think that there is a typology, a use, a size that we should be focusing more on and promoting more mass timber use in? And I asked that question because everybody talks about taller, taller, taller. You know we're going 18 to 21 to. You know there's hybrid towers that are going double that you know across the world. Where do you think that we should be focusing for mass timber right now?

Jean-Marc: 25:38

I love that question. Where have you been the past 10 years? High school? No, I'm serious, this is. This is something I remember. I remember being in New York and talking with the lead engineer of the Arup, their mass timber machine, Michelle Roloff. I don't know if you know her.

Brady: 25:58

I know the name. I don't know her personally.

Jean-Marc: 26:02

She's great, very thoughtful. We had the opportunity to just engage on a project. I don't think we ever actually delivered a project together, but we were asked to speak at an event and she came out and said something that just it warmed my heart because it was exactly the way I feel we have the ability technically to build as tall as we want and other than a monument to our own hubris. I don't think that really necessarily achieves end goals, because it really does create more of a unique boutique type approach and it's not necessarily to the best interests of the industry at large or does it properly respond to the need for us to draw carbon down at scale. That being said, workforce housing, which I mentioned before, especially in the urban milieu, is really, really important and it's one of my passions, and the ability to build a good quality structural product that can be used and is efficient and has replicability in the urban setting should allow for urban workers to actually live in the cities that they work in. It should be affordable. It is scalable. Susan Jones and the Heartwood Project up in Seattle is a perfect example. It's a dream of mine to work with Susan at some point and actually deliver one of those. We're very friendly. I've known her since before she built her hubs and she's a very visionary person. Our director of technical services served with her, also on the Tallwood Building Committee. So there's kind of a mutual path towards helping develop the code.

Jean-Marc: 27:57

And while it's great to be able to build tall, if you look at the utilization in any urban setting the amount of buildings that are over six stories percentage-wise is very small. So taking that and using wood in those applications, I think it's not wasteful but it's not as fruitful as if you're going to hit the 80-20 rule. If you look at the five boroughs in New York City, there's over a million buildings and of those million buildings only 17,000 are taller than six stories. So, percentage-wise, if you think of what can we do across the landscape of the world? Actually, because they're talking like there's going to be a new New York City built in the third world countries every year or two, right?

Jean-Marc: 28:47

So there's this huge movement towards the cities. We're going to need affordable housing and I think that good design and utilization of that fiber can actually serve both purposes. It's going to give people a good place to live, it's going to be safe, it's going to have much longer durability than the 5 over 1 light frame projects that are being built, and it's also going to help offset the issue that you're talking about with needing more capacity. The ability for the manufacturers to actually produce on a consistent basis and achieve efficiency and be viable is really critical, right? We can't afford any more losses in the industry. We don't need more manufacturers going down because they can't make payroll.

Brady: 29:46

That's a real travesty. Yes, it is. And to unpack your question specifically in the multifamily and we'll use that five over one example, I've been talking to a lot of multifamily developers lately who aren't necessarily deep in the mass timber industry. Maybe they heard about it when I talked to them about it. The number one response right off the bat is no way, it's cost competitive. There's no way that I can build this five over one close to par with mass timber, like what would be your response to that.

Jean-Marc: 30:12

I'd say they're probably just adhering to the, to the way the code is written and and not distinguishing the true overall cost of ownership.

Jean-Marc: 30:23

If they're a developer flipper, maybe they're right. If they're a developer that's going to hold onto it or a client that's going to hold onto it for a while, there's definitely an argument for the sustainable nature and the quality of construction that you're going to get from that. Secondly, I do believe that if you're building with mass timber, not just the efficiency of the structure from a structural standpoint but also the impact on the quality of life and just the mechanical loads of a mass timber structure versus a 5 over 1, 1 tend to be leaky. They're not efficient, you know. I mean you can go on and on about why that does or doesn't pencil out, but I think that argument doesn't really hold a lot of water. I think it's a very short-term cost analysis and it may be that it's just predicated on them wanting to take that, build it and flip it. If you're going to be a long-term holder of the project, just the maintenance of that project over time is going to dictate that it's much more efficient to build with mass timber.

Brady: 31:31

So, with the exception of California and maybe a few other cities in the states, on the pricing factor, carbon isn't in the equation. How do you see carbon pricing moving forward, factoring into the mass timber industry, like when people are being allocated hey, you got so much embodied carbon or operational emissions, combine those up however you want. You're only allowed this much. You got to pay for anything excess of it. How do you see that playing into mass timbers growth over the next decade or so?

Jean-Marc: 32:00

It's obviously becoming more and more important. For me. It's always been part of my pursuit, right? The reason I'm doing this is I want to capture carbon at scale. I want to, you know, put carbon into buildings instead of putting it into the air, and I think that speaks to a lot of the people that have come on board at Nordic right. It tends to be a common, a common thread that unites us. Uh, so uh. For me, if we were talking just um, you know, conventional construction, you're.

Jean-Marc: 32:33

You're finding more and more people that are talking about the 2030 agenda. I wonder where they've been for the past 20 years, because it's not new, right? We've been talking about carbon for a long, long time and, yeah, there's no atheists in a foxhole, right? So we're getting closer to that. Everyone wants to jump in and say we're doing our bit, and so on. What I'm finding now is that we're seeing non-traditional uses for mass timber start to become really impactful in terms of volume because of the carbon question, and if you look at it strictly from a pro-pharma standpoint, it does not pencil up right.

Jean-Marc: 33:11

Tilt-up walls, warehouses, data centers, that kind of thing. You would never hear them talking about that five years ago and now those kind of conversations are coming in and people them talking about that five years ago. And now those kinds of conversations are coming in and people really want to draw carbon down and they want to be carbon neutral. So that is having a huge impact and we're seeing more and more of that as things progress right.

Jean-Marc: 33:32

Two years ago, maybe one out of a hundred projects we would hear that, and now it's like virtually every project that's either academic or industrial, believe it or not are coming across and that's the big metric. That's what they want to do. And so with that you talked about commoditization, that the whole distinction of how much carbon you're capturing wood is 50% carbon by dry weight. We all know that, so it's pretty easy to do that calculation. But then the other side of the coin is the production costs and the true greenhouse gas impacts and the global warming potential of the manufacturing right. So I think that's going to become the next part of the equation. Carbon itself is one Efficiency of production, and the through process all the way through to the install are going to be part of the next dialogue.

Brady: 34:34

Who are you following right now that you think has the right dialogue about either carbon or mass timber? Who do you think more people should be paying attention to?

Jean-Marc: 34:43

I just think that a lot of the people that got me involved in mass timber, that were kind of my leads early on, are still the people that I listened to. I think they were right to begin with and they continue to be right and maybe wisdom comes from repetitiveness and exposure right, and they just maybe, maybe wisdom comes from repetitiveness and exposure. Andrew Law big part of the reason that that I I love mass timber. Susan Jones, alan Organski, out of New Haven he's, he's been a tremendous mentor to me. Got me involved in the first net zero project in in Connecticut. It was a school that they built for underprivileged kids.

Jean-Marc: 35:23

So there's the social mandate as well as the mass timber mandate and I think the more I go I find myself leaning more towards the people that are geared not just to utilization of mass timber but the social impact and the social governance and the equality that mass timber can bring. So I'm leaning more towards those type of projects right, the underserved, the underprivileged, those that actually need to be living in good housing and they can't necessarily afford to move into the ones that they'd like to you know. So Susan Jones's Hardwood, for instance. Michael Eliason up in Seattle I think he's really a great overall architect with vision for design. You know there's more, but I think those people kind of bring it to the table.

Brady: 36:23

Yeah, those are good answers and I think those are all great people for everybody, listening to, connect with, learn about.

Jean-Marc: 36:29

I hesitate to start making lists because I end up forgetting a bunch of people that are really important to me and I want to apologize at the time that are really important to me and I want to. I want to apologize at the time. There's, there's definitely not an intent here to to you know, to to mislead, because there are some really tremendous people out there that are doing great work. I apologize if I if I didn't mention.

Brady: 36:50

Well, if we were to sit here and make a list of all the people doing good work, that would? That would just be the whole podcast, right?

Jean-Marc: 36:55

Well, it would be a lot longer podcast for sure.

Brady: 36:58

That's true, knowing the path that you just kind of laid out, what you're focused on, what's next for you and what's next for Nordic in like the next five to 10 years.

Jean-Marc: 37:06

Nordic is going to continue to try and reduce its carbon footprint more and more right Over the past 10 years we have grown from a single sawmill manufacturing I-Joyce and glue lamb and dimensional lumber to two sawmills, then to two sawmills on a pulp plant. Recently we acquired two new sawmills. So we're now up to 16 million acres of forest land that we harvest through FSC practices forest land that we harvest through FSC practices. So there's that right. We want to continue to make impact at scale with good social governance, good sustainability attributes, making sure that we're being a good supporter of the local communities, and so with that, for instance, we just engaged with the local Cree community to modernize and bring back a sawmill on their land so that they can become part, help control the utilization of their resources, and we're helping them bring that to market.

Jean-Marc: 38:16

The next steps are going to be continued global warming potential reduction through our operations, more efficiency there We've looked at electric vehicles on our forestry operations Right now.

Jean-Marc: 38:33

That's not viable, but that doesn't mean that we're not going to continue to keep our ear to the ground on that. Not viable, but that doesn't mean that we're not going to continue to keep our ear to the ground on that. Interestingly enough, recently there was just a post on LinkedIn not sure if you saw it, but we've signed an agreement with a European company that is looking at forestry extraction by a blip. So this is totally new and it's going to be a long-term process I think, maybe four or five years before we can actually do more efficient extraction. That's a nice goal to have. So I think there's a leadership role for us within the community and, of course, we're harvesting on a pretty wide swath of area right. We're not like a fabricator and because we're vertically integrated, that that's something that's really key to us. Um, and hopefully that will, that will continue to spark innovation for um, for the you know the bigger industry.

Brady: 39:52

Yeah, and especially if you have such a large footprint, you know those small incremental changes or um towards the positive have a very large effect. Right, you know, you, when people hear, oh, if we can reduce something four or 5%, it doesn't sound like that. But you're like, well, we're doing that across 16 million acres of harvesting, like all of a sudden that becomes a bigger number.

Jean-Marc: 40:11

Um exactly, so exactly.

Brady: 40:13

Those are all great things and I'm looking forward to watching all of that unfold Before I ask my last question how can people get ahold of you and Nordic?

Jean-Marc: 40:21

I'm real easy to get ahold of my phone's on our website. My email address is seanmarkdubois at nordicca. The Nordic website is nordicca. It's pretty quick and dirty to get to and we're available. I've got a really amazing team of coworkers, colleagues, specialists, that I engage with. We have 80 designers, engineers, architects and technicians at our main office in Montreal that are dedicated to this kind of service. So, yeah, feel free to reach out. Email is probably the best. You can find me on LinkedIn. Look to connect. We can always exchange information that way.

Brady: 41:06

Well, I'll link all that down below. Everybody can check it out and get a hold of you. Last question If you had the power to change anything in the industry, what would it be and why?

Jean-Marc: 41:15

Anything at all, huh.

Brady: 41:17

Anything in the industry.

Jean-Marc: 41:21

Anything in the industry. Anything in the industry. And we're not talking forest products industry, we're talking mass timber at large.

Brady: 41:25

Mass timber at large.

Jean-Marc: 41:27

Well, if I had a magic wand and I could change anything, the one thing I would address is project slippage. Right, I know I'm harping on it, but it is really impactful to the, to everyone in the industry. I remember talking to a manufacturer out west that I've developed a pretty nice relationship with over. You know, you go to, you go to conventions, you go to the mass timber events and you meet the same people and it's a great community. But he told me he said, jean-marc, if I would have known that he would take me 18 to 24 months after getting qualified to be able to actually get product to a job site, I don't know that I would have made the investment. And this is someone who's very well respected in the industry and I think that if the industry had the ability to support itself in a proper fashion, there's way more potential business than any one company can get right.

Jean-Marc: 42:28

We don't want it all, we want the jobs that are right for us, and I think everyone else that we deal with or that we compete with in the industry is exactly the same. So finding the right fit, I think, is important. But, you know, making sure that we have the longevity and we have. The long-term viability of the business is critical, and so for me, that's really what I would like to see and that would address all the issues that the industry is talking about the commoditization, the standardization, right. I mean, if you find the right supplier and you've got the right timeframe and you're committed and you have the ability to take that project, that's a good fit right. And we need more successful business. There's a huge, huge opportunity for everyone in the industry and we just can't afford any more losses. So go out and design a good structure and you'll find a good supplier. And let's make it happen. Let's draw carbon down at scale.

Brady: 43:30

Another great answer. I love it. Well, thanks for chatting with me. It was a pleasure talking with you and, like I said, I look forward to watching what you guys do over the next decade. Thanks for coming on. Yep, all right, thank you, appreciate it.