“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future,” said the physicist Niels Bohr. Maybe. But while I wouldn’t normally argue with a Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist, I’m sufficiently confident in some aspects of our industry to have a go.
In this article, I’ll argue that, in the future, the wood industry will become more valued and more important than any of us could imagine. I’ll explain why I think that it could be regarded like the Silicon Valley industries are now: high profile, courted by big business, and desperately desirable places to work. And I’ll describe the typical wood-processing industry of the future.
We’ve already come a long way. Recently, a friend of mine showed me a fairly kitsch trinket box that she’d found in her mum’s house. Her mum had bought it while she was on holiday in the 1970s. On her return, she decided that it was hideous and threw it to the back of a cupboard, where it remained until her daughter found it last month. It still had its original packaging, which proudly declared that it had been “hand carved from exotic hardwoods”.
We laughed at the idea that such a crass declaration of environmental destruction was ever acceptable. Even the most unenlightened people know that exotic hardwoods need to be protected, not turned into tourist tat. So attitudes have changed a great deal over the last few decades.
Changing attitudes
I believe that attitudes will continue to change, and that the pace of change will increase – leading to big changes for the fortunes and the nature of the timber sector. There are two big reasons why I make this prediction with confidence.
The first reason is the size of the environmental challenges that we face. They’re big and, importantly, it’s not just tree huggers and rock stars who care about the environment these days. The effects of climate change are already being seen by big agriculture businesses who are deeply concerned about the changes to rainfall and temperature patterns which are impacting on their yields. Politicians care about the impact of increased food costs on the citizens on whose votes they depend. Business leaders are perplexed about how they can operate their businesses with 80% fewer CO² emissions. It all adds up to a serious momentum for action.
The second reason is found in the properties of the material that we’re dealing with. If someone invented a new material that actually absorbed CO2, they’d be famous. If that material could also be used as a building material, they’d be well on the way to their own Nobel Prize. If their new invention could also be used as a carbon-neutral fuel, Bill Gates might be wondering for how much longer he’d be the world’s richest man.
We all know that I’ve just described the humble material that we handle every day. So just think: in a few years’ time, how will people react when they hear that, way back in the first decade of the 21st century, people used to throw this material in landfill skips? Or that old products containing this material were simply thrown away, without the precious material being extracted?
Increasing value
In the future, the properties of wood will make it much more valuable. The costs of recovering wood from old products will be outweighed. Companies and entrepreneurs will invest significant time and money in designing new ways of extracting wood from old products to keep the wood in a form that allows as much of it as possible to be used in new products and the country’s brightest engineering graduates will compete to be assigned to projects that maximise wood energy generation.
The finance markets will see the opportunity, and invest fortunes in companies that prove themselves to be capable of developing new wood recycling or woodfuel innovations, thereby delivering big returns on investments. The scale will be vast, as the emerging markets of China and India demand the services of these companies.
And the country that produces more of these companies than any other country – the country that develops real competitive advantage and tens of thousands of green jobs in this valuable industry – will be…
Well, that depends on the vision and the will of business and elected leaders in the UK, and other countries.
I think I’ll take Niels Bohr’s advice about this last point.
