Company green by design
Entrepreneurs combine knowledge and passion
By Bud Gilham
Everywhere you look these days you see "Green" products and "Green" programming. There are "Green" cookbooks, "Green" clothing and even "Green" pet products. But what does it mean to be "Green"? My search for going green led me to a Powell River couple and their home business.
Polar Bear One Forestry Products is a small company started by a husband and wife team. Both were unemployed; both have health problems. They and their special needs child were at the mercy of government agencies and handouts for help, a situation they didn't like and wanted to change. Limited education and limited resources fostered a path out for this local couple and they went back to something simple. Mick and Diane Boser combined their knowledge of working in the logging industry, with their joy of working with wood; they started a split cedar rail fencing business.
Many local lakes in the Powell River area have been cleaned up; snags and sunken logs have been removed from the water. Many of these logs have found their way to a new and useful life as fencing material. Diane and Mick salvage logs from these lake cleanup operations, as well as shingle mill cast offs and hog piles. The logs are cut to length, split and then worked into the design the customer wishes. Looking through the album the Powell River couple has of their completed projects certainly verifies this variety. On one project they used discarded blasted rock as posts. The cedar rails seemed to flow across the property through a string of large boulders. There are many styles of fencing and gates that can be made with reclaimed cedar and no preservatives. I asked the couple, "Why not other types of fencing?"
"There is pressure-treated wood and posts for fencing, but they are milled, not natural, and the preservative leaches into the soil. You are told not to use these posts near crops," Mick stated. "All the wood we use is the other wood, what the mills and logging operations deem as junk." Mick went on to explain that he knows wood and enjoys working with it. "All I need is my chain saw, axes and wedges. I am not a mason or a good enough welder to do iron or brick fences. Also these are not natural to the Powell River area; they don't fit in with the rustic look that people seem to want."
Mick and Diane use a home-made log splitter to get the job done. The machine is made from an old discarded boat trailer, part of a blade off a road grader and cables and pulleys picked up here and there. The only purchased items were two electric winches, run by reclaimed car batteries. The couple admitted at first this machine was slower; they used it mostly to alleviate wear and tear on their backs. It seems now, with usage and experience, the homemade rail-splitter is actually faster and more efficient.
Polar Bear One Forestry Products uses cast off material, even to build equipment. The green factor of their business was born out of necessity.
"Making use of what you have and re-using things is a way of life. Poor people have been doing the green thing all their lives. It is not a movement, just a way of life for us."
The couple talked about how people used to use what was available, not what could be ordered in from somewhere else.
"The stone fencing done in Scotland or England, they used what they had the most of. Here, we have huge forests so we use wood."
Mick and Diane say it is nice to leave a job looking like no one has been there, just a few wood rails running through the trees, or across a field, being the only changes.
"If a customer wants to they can use nails to hold a fence section in place, but it is the ability to move the fence that is the plus. The farmers used to do this to move their stock from one field to the next," said Mick.
"The only thing that limits what can be done with the cedar fencing is the customer's imagination," he added.
Going green is the reality of the future for all of us, but for this previously unemployed Powell River couple a way for the future means using an old idea to create their future. Their idea for a business, of doing things simpler, is part of the wave of the future; theirs, the planet's and ours.
