UBC-developed ‘wood foam’ enters production

Inside a new facility at Main Street and Terminal Avenue, wood fibre is moving through a production line and emerging, transformed, as a block of lightweight “wood foam.” For Dr. Feng Jiang, who first developed the material in his laboratory at the University of British Columbia, the moment is years in the making.

For Reg Ogen, president and CEO of Yinka Dene Economic Development Limited Partnership (YLP) and a leader of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, it signals a shift in the Canadian bioeconomy: a new economic relationship between Indigenous communities and the forests they have stewarded for generations.

Millions of tonnes of plastic foam packaging end up in landfills each year, where they can persist for more than 500 years. This new facility aims to change that. By transforming wood waste resulting from logging or forest fires—material that might otherwise be burned or discarded—into biodegradable packaging and insulation, the partnership is turning a costly liability for the forestry sector into a high-value, sustainable product.

Indigenous-led commercialisation

The pilot plant is operated by DicinFoam, a majority-owned subsidiary of YLP, the business arm of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation. Dicin (pronounced DIH-chun), the Wet’suwet’en word for wood, reflects the company’s connection to both the forest and Wet’suwet’en culture. The underlying intellectual property is co-owned by UBC and YLP.

“This partnership is a blueprint for the future of the forestry industry,” said Ogen. “Today’s forestry industrialization models have extracted value from all forest dwellers, communities, and our Indigenous cultures.”

From lab to pilot-scale production

The plant converts softwoods such as spruce, pine and fir into a lightweight wood foam using heat, mechanical processing and minimal chemical additives. In packaging applications, the material is designed to break down in soil within months. The facility also produces insulation panels treated to meet building performance requirements, a market that currently relies heavily on imported wood-based products.

The technology originated in the lab of Dr. Jiang, a professor in UBC’s faculty of forestry and environmental stewardship whose research focuses on turning underused forest biomass into high-value bio-based materials. His lab continues to support DicinFoam’s scale-up, testing new feedstock combinations and expanding the range of applications as the company grows.