Columbia Falls-based SmartLam — the only manufacturer of cross-laminated timber in the country — had a voice on the national stage at a high-profile wood products workshop offered by the White House Rural Council in Washington, D.C.

SmartLam General Manager Casey Malmquist, a longtime Whitefish home builder, was invited to participate in the workshop, “Building with Wood: Jobs and the Environment.”

Part of the council’s work is to promote enhanced quality of life and economic opportunity in rural America. Toward that end, it offered educational information on the environmental benefits of wood building materials.

The take-away message, Malmquist said, is that “the future is wood and the future is good.”

The White House council, along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, issued a directive to the group of 80 wood-products representatives to pursue sustainable building, research and advanced product manufacturing, as well as state and local policy initiatives to advance wood construction.

Two officials with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation also attended the White House Rural Council workshop, along with Montana Wood Products Association Executive Vice President Julie Altemus.

F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Co. Vice President and General Manager Chuck Roady was invited but couldn’t attend.

Cross-laminated timber was very much at the center of conversation at the workshop, but very few of the people in attendance knew that the product, also called mass timber, is being domestically manufactured, Malmquist said. Europe has been a leader in cross-laminated timber manufacturing.

SmartLam began making the innovated engineered wood product last year, finding an immediate niche in making cross-laminated timber panels as mats for heavy equipment in the Bakken oil fields. The biggest drawback as a “first generation” plant, Malmquist explained, is that the manufacturing largely is done by hand.

The plant currently is manufacturing 100,000 board feet of mass timber monthly, but the addition of another lamination press and a 12-ton computer numerical control machine will double production by speeding up the process of making a panel from more than an hours to 12 minutes, Malmquist said. More production means a bigger work force.

“We’ve got 21 people right now and we hope to double that within the next year and a half,” he said.

SmartLam also is in the throes of getting certification for architectural-grade cross-laminated timber that will springboard the company to the next level of making mass timber for building projects.

“Our plan was to get the plant up and running and learn about the constraints,” Malmquist said. “We’ve been able to do that with the [drilling] rig mats.”

There’s been a flurry of interest internationally over the unique wood product. Popular Science magazine devoted an expansive article to it in its February edition titled: “The World’s Most Advanced Building Material Is...Wood.”

“Compared with steel or concrete, CLT ... is cheaper, easier to assemble and more fire resistant,” Popular Science stated. “It’s also more sustainable. Wood is renewable like any crop, and it’s a carbon sink, sequestering the carbon dioxide it absorbed during growth even after it’s been turned into lumber.”

European plants are fully automated, Malmquist pointed out, adding that SmartLam’s move toward automation will make the company more competitive. Europe’s industry also is “vertically integrated” from seedlings to the finished product, and it’s subsidized.

A nine-story building made exclusively from cross-laminated timber in London has become a poster child, so to speak, for what is possible with mass timber.

The U.S. is making strides. The American Plywood Association is in the process of recognizing and certifying cross-laminated timber as a U.S. building product, and code approval is being drawn up concurrently.

“I see better forest management practices as a way to utilize that resource more effectively,” Malmquist said.

Malmquist said the work ethic of the SmartLam crew has played a huge role in the company’s early success.

The company’s major investors, Western Building Center and Greenstream LLC, took a leap of faith in financially supporting SmartLam, said Malmquist, who also has a financial stake in the company.

“Their faith and foresight has been pretty amazing,” he said.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.