Team hopes to promote local wood with grant

Hawaii’s forestry industry may play a larger role in supplying the state’s lumber needs with the help of a $250,000 federal grant.

The Department of Land and Natural Resources, in conjunction with two other organizations, was awarded the state’s first federal Wood Innovation Grant. Out of 119 proposals, Hawaii’s was one of 34 projects chosen to receive the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s grant which funds sustainable wood utilization.

“We have these resources here and in abundance, and with them, we can create things that are really outside of the box and are innovative,” said Joseph Valenti, who is building a small house made of albizia wood on the campus of University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Valenti was part of the group that won the federal grant and hopes to use the money to prove that locally sourced wood will make Hawaii more self-sufficient.

In addition to the DLNR, the grant was awarded to the Albizia Project, Valenti’s group, and the Hawaii Forest Industry Association, which promotes forestry in Hawaii. The grant winners formed the Hawaii Wood Utilization Team with Valenti as its director.

Valenti said the team is not focused on albizia, but is instead targeting Kauai’s Kokee forest and looking at species such as eucalyptus and pine to build a second prototype home on Oahu.

With the grant, the team hopes to promote the sale of wood that is hazardous to forests because it burns easily and spreads wildfires.

The team also plans build an education center in Kauai, said Valenti.

“It is our vision for the islands to be more self-sufficient with local resources instead of importing the resources from outside,” said Philipp LaHaela Walter, who works at DLNR’s Division of Forestry and Wildlife. “We think that this is also good for increasing the island’s resiliency,” he said.

The state’s forestry program oversees approximately 14,000 acres of timber management areas, many of which are full of untapped potential.

The creation of “green jobs,” as LaHaela Walter describes them, would grow the state’s forest and wood products industry by increasing jobs in areas such as harvesting, transportation, processing, and architecture, while also reducing the risk of wildfires. “They (wildfires) are not part of our ecosystems here,” said LaHaela Walter. “So it’s very important for the department of forestry and wildlife to decrease the fuel load that we have out there so we have [fewer] wildfires.”

In addition to boosting Hawaii’s forestry industry, the grant will be used to create a Hawaii Forest Products Directory to provide more transparency for Hawaii residents and to help builders understand where they can get their wood needs met locally, said Michael Tam, CEO of Martin &MacArthur and member of the Hawaii Forest Industry Association. Tam said that the grant is crucial to developing the state’s wood industry. “The size of the wood industry … is not big enough,” he said, “We’re admitting that the wood industry needs to grow.”