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A Montana lumber company that is boldly doing what few in the lumber industry have yet to do

Posted on: 12-06-2016 by Elizabeth Yokel

Rob Chaney of the Missoulian recently discussed the subject of noble rot.

While the phrase 'noble rot' does not have a plesant sound to it, these moldy grapes actually produce some of the priciest of juices during wine making. Did you know that: Noble Rot is the name of a wine-bar-restaurant with a shop and a magazine in the UK? Yes, it's true, as you see. Trivial? Certainly! Though it is likely to make colorful conversation.

Who knew that winemakers are not the only beneficiaries of noble rot.

Visionary Ryan Palma of Sustainable Lumber Company has found a bounty in Montana’s beetle-killed, fungus-stained pine forests. Picking at a friable seam of rotten heartwood in a Ponderosa pine plank reveals a defect that makes the lumber a sought after raw material for the production of consumer goods such as high-end, living room tables.

As it turns out, there is a lucrative market for finished goods that are

made with aged woods, which rot, split, check and crack. Damage to

the wood is what adds to the texture of the sought after, raw material.

Sustainable Lumber Company has a demand for beetle-killed pine with exotic blue hues. The showroom in Missoula, Montana presents an impressive selection of pine and fir flooring panels, which are available in a diversity of eight shades on three surfaces from smooth to hand-gouged.

Tree species known as softwood has dings, dents and scratches, which occur either naturally or by Palma’s preparation process. Customer find these more desirable than hardwood species like beech or aspen. “The industry’s changed a lot in the last 20 years,” said Palma, who was actually the University of Montana Grizzly football free safety (during the 1995 national championship team). adding: “I used to sell boxcars of lumber to distributors, who sold it to retailers, who sold it to builders. Now I’m the largest producer of fir flooring in the world, and it’s a 100 percent made-in-Montana product.”

Palma’s six-year-old company employs just one or two loggers who cut trees on order and send them to a Mennonite community for the hand-finishing work. About 40 people there hand-surface, dye and shape the wood into flooring and paneling. Sustainable Lumber also makes surfaces for cabinets and other custom fittings, but limits that work to local customers. Palma said 90 percent of his inventory ships out of state.

Last Wednesday, he loaded seven pallets of finished fir into a Fed Ex truck for delivery to an internet start-up company in Brooklyn, New York. “A lot of the lumber industry is a dinosaur, not willing to change,” Palma said. “We’re doing things nobody in the lumber industry was doing. I’m building a 3-D showroom on the website so people can virtually walk through and see everything we have. It builds validity that we’re a real company, not some internet broker.”

Innovative wood products have made a significant dent in the traditional lumber market pie chart. On Nov. 14, Alaska Airlines flew a passenger jet from Seattle to Washington, D.C. on a tank of 20 percent biofuel made from wood pulp. An Oregon company produces sheets 12 feet wide, 48 feet long and 2 feet thick. They compete with concrete slabs for skyscraper construction, with the potential to support commercial buildings six to 10 stories tall.

About SLC

But while Palma may need a single beetle-killed Ponderosa pine for a custom table order, he said he depends on Montana’s existing 10 large sawmills for the hundreds of thousands of board-feet of Douglas fir he uses for flooring. “We’re trying to use technology where nobody else in the industry really is right now,” Palma said. “But we still need that mill infrastructure to stay in place, not only for us but for the overall health of the forest.