Washington Business Winter 2020 | Washington Business | Page 45

business backgrounder | industry
“Students go through all the process to combine resins with composite materials
to make stronger, lighter materials,” Patching said, calling his class “industrial arts
and crafts.” He adds, “It does take a lot of craft and hand skills to work with these
materials.”
innovation and investment
The tour reflected the fact that manufacturing is an employment pillar in every corner
of the state.
In Colville, Russ Vaagen is creating jobs and helping the environment through
his new cross-laminated timber (CLT) mill. Using small-diameter timber harvested
during fire thinning and prevention work, he mills and glues them together using an
enormous press. Vaagen Timbers’ three-, five-, and seven-ply CLT panels have already
been sold as far away as Finland.
Vaagen sees himself as on the vanguard of a whole new way of restoring forests to
health while creating rural jobs and a brand new, easy-to-assemble building material.
“This is the tip of a very large iceberg,” Vaagen said of CLT. “It’s fast, it’s safe, and
it’s very high quality.”
One of those rural jobs he created is being filled by Tyler Curtis, who had moved
away from his hometown of Chewelah, Stevens County, to find work in Spokane. He
and his new wife were able to move back home last year, thanks to his new job at
Vaagen Timbers.
“This is a good trade. I could see myself being here for the next 20 years and raising
a family,” said Curtis, who is working as a CNC operator at Vaagen Timbers.
As the tour continued, it became clear that the private-sector growth of innovative
products like CLT is aided by forward-looking research at Washington’s public-sector
universities.
Mike Wolcott, associate director for research and director of the Office of Clean
Technology at Washington State University, said that new wood-based building
products like CLT, which are suitable to build high-rises, are a way for rural areas to
benefit from the economic dynamism of America’s cities.
“It provides an avenue for the connection of our rural, natural resource dependent
communities to the urban areas that are growing,” Wolcott said.
While research is a pillar of manufacturing, it’s also vital to have strong, ongoing
support from private-sector partners for manufacturing to succeed.
AWB awarded Kitsap Bank with the 2019 Manufacturing Excellence Award for
Innovation to recognize its innovative edg3 FUND, which awards a $25,000 prize to
a local manufacturer each year through a public, competitive program.
“This is a good trade. I could
see myself being here for the
next 20 years and raising a
family.”
— Tyler Curtis, a CNC operator at
Vaagen Timbers in Colville
building the future
Speaking of innovation, family-owned companies like the Seattle-Tacoma Box Company
showed how they are still creating new products. With fourth-generation CEO Ferd
Nist working with members of the sixth generation (including granddaughter Erika
Nist), the company continues to be creative. It is a national leader in making wooden
“store-to-door” vaults (the kind of portable pods popular with people wanting to
store or move goods) in Kent. The company has other locations making cardboard
and plastic corrugated boxes.
winter 2020 45