David Warner can thank his pals from the Grateful Dead for the long, strange trip he’s been on from California sound studio builder to Saskatchewan strawboard manufacturer.
The journey began in San Francisco in the late 1990s where he was constructing a studio for a spinoff of the legendary 1960s rock band.
“We were playing with different associated panels for acoustic reasons. One of these panels really intrigued me,” said Warner.
It was an experimental strawboard panel made from a technology developed by the Alberta Research Council. Warner was so intrigued he acquired a licence for the technology and formed a company called Above Board Technologies to commercialize the product.
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Around the same time, the failed Parkland Strawboard plant came up for sale in Kamsack, Sask. The timing was serendipitous.
“We didn’t want to waste time doing infrastructure build out when we could inherit infrastructure and get moving quicker,” said Warner.
He is confident the new plant won’t follow the same path as its $7 million predecessor and the parade of other failed strawboard plants that ended up in receivership.
At the height of the industry in the early 1990s there were around 45 strawboard factories in Canada and the United States. Two or three remain, Warner estimates.
“They have been plagued with failure since (the industry’s) inception,” he said.
The downfall of the strawboard business was that the product was being sold into low value nonstructural markets where it was used in furniture, countertops and cabinet cores.
It didn’t help that they competed with wood-based product made from free waste lumber while the strawboard plant had to pay farmers for their feedstock.
“That was the absolute start base of a failed concept,” said the California entrepreneur.
Above Board is employing a business model where its product will compete head-to-head with plywood and oriented strand board in the higher value, structural-grade lumber market, where the panels will be used for roof and wall sheathing.
The company’s TigerBoard panels will be the world’s first tree-free structural panels. Warner said the structural certification testing of the panels produced from the Kamsack pilot plant is 90 percent complete.
“We have not failed a test yet,” he said.
The first commercial scale plant could be built within two years of receiving the structural certification designation. It would be capable of producing 11 million strawboard panels per year and would require an estimated 480,000 tonnes of wheat straw from about 342,000 acres of farmland in the nearby area.
That would be three times the amount of straw procured by the Isobord Enterprises’ plant in Elie, Man., that went into receivership in 2001, owing farmers almost $1 million from straw they sold to the plant.
Above Board would like to build its first commercial plant in Saskatchewan or one of the neighbouring prairie provinces and would begin contracting straw from farmers anywhere from six months to a full year before plant start-up.
The production process involves splitting the wheat straw strands longitudinally and mixing them with resin binders and a small amount of wax. The mixture is then subjected to heat, pressure and a weaving process, producing a panel stronger than wood.
Above Board claims its product will have additional advantages over its wood-based counterparts, including greater moisture resistance due to the natural wax content in straw, inherent resistance to rot and termites and better fire resistance due to the high silica content in wheat straw.
“The added kicker will be the green factor,” said Warner.
The product will conserve dwindling forests and provide a home for an agricultural waste product.
The company has a verbal agreement to sell all of its panels through the largest distributor of wood products in the United States. A few panels may even find their way back into the same venue that got the whole project rolling.
“The Grateful Dead are playing with speaker boxes made from strawboard,” said Warner.
