Business View Magazine | April 2021

73 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE APRIL 2021 ELK CREEK FOREST PRODUCTS Products, he built homes. He can remember working on a so-called green project in the early 1990s. The chosen materials were Styrofoam, steel and concrete. “The client was very environmentally conscious and wanted to build green and sustainable,” Taron emphasizes. “That was in the ‘90s, and there was a paradigm that cutting wood was bad and that using Styrofoam, chemical concrete and steel were actually the green way to go. What is amazing to me, now that I am in the lumber industry and on the manufacturing side, is that there has been a monumental shift in public understanding about what it means to be truly green and renewable. It’s the very trees that are the value. They sequester carbon, they do all these positive things, they are the renewable resource. For the lumber mills it can feel like a bit of whiplash, related to public opinion. Mills have expressed, ‘we were the devil for cutting trees at one point in not-so-long-ago memory and now trees the poster child of what is green and renewable.’” One challenge for the industry has actually created an opportunity for Elk Creek Forest Products. There is still a need for specialty products that cannot be found at name brand retailers, and even at some independently owned lumber companies. Also the knowledge to even produce those specialty products is disappearing. “So, the performance needed for some of the unique product demand in the lumber market