Survey reveals gap in "wood awareness".

• Position: Brief Article

When you think of commercial and public buildings of four storeys or less, what types of building materials come to mind? Did you first think of wood? If you did and you live in Mattawa, South River, Sturgeon Falls or any of the rural communities surrounding North Bay, you loin about 20 per cent of others from these areas who share the same thought. If you live in North Bay, however, according to a recent benchmark survey conducted in the Blue Sky Region to measure "wood awareness," only 10 per cent of your neighbours are like-minded.

Perhaps brick, concrete or steel first came to mind. These materials certainly have a higher response rate, claiming 30, 23 and 19 per cent respectively, and perhaps this is because the vast majority of the survey respondents believe that these are the materials that public buildings should be made of.

In North Bay, only seven per cent of people surveyed believed wood was a practical construction material for public buildings. In the surrounding rural communities 19 per cent of respondents believed it was practical to use wood.

Those numbers are not very high for a region whose economic backbone is the forestry industry. Ten per cent of this region's workforce is directly employed in the forestry industry and many additional jobs support this industry at the secondary level.

But what does all this mean? According to Marianne Berube, Northern Ontario site coordinator for Wood WORKS!, it means "there is a lot of work to do!"

Wood WORKS! is an industry led initiative sponsored by the Canadian Wood Council. Its mandate is to promote the use of wood in all types of buildings -- homes, schools, medical facilities, recreation centres, commercial plazas, government institutions and industrial complexes.

"Many people mistakenly believe that using wood is harmful to the environment or that it isn't strong enough to use in commercial and industrial construction," says Bewbe. "Of...