GOING BLUE: HOW FAR COAST HARNESSED NEW REALITIES
When nature hands you Mountain Pine Beetle-damaged wood, you make Mountain Pine Beetle-damaged wood furniture.
Green leads to blue
Back when Vanoc announced that it wanted to make the Vancouver 2010 Olympics the greenest Winter Games ever, we at Far Coast looked around for a great way to contribute. We wanted to do something significant, something well beyond our existing green policies. The solution, it turned out, lay dying all around us.
Under our noses
According to the provincial government of BC, the mountain pine beetle has been eating its way through BC's forests for years, leaving millions of dead (mainly) lodgepole pine trees in its wake. The beetle was once kept in check by months of minus-40-degree Rocky Mountain winter weather. But in recent years the bug has proved hearty enough to survive our warmer winters, a phenomenon that many scientists attribute to global climate change.
Vancouver students rise to occasion
So with that in mind, we challenged six teams of students at Vancouver's Emily Carr University of Art + Design to design an Olympic Chair. The stipulations were that all chairs must be made locally, and that they had to be made from BC ‘blue pine' (the blue colour is introduced when the fungus Grosmannia clavigera hitches a ride with the hole-boring mountain pine beetle, then blooms inside affected trees).
Sit down on a winning design
The six teams went to work, submitting their design proposals to Far Coast for review and judging. After selecting a design, we engaged the University of British Columbia's Woodworking department to produce the chair in quantity.
We're thrilled to see our Olympic chairs in use throughout the Winter Games venue. Far Coast cares about the world we live in and this partnership is but a small example of our commitment.
