Story written by Qurrat Ul Ain.
A chemist in a UBC forestry lab is transforming British Columbia’s wood waste into sustainable packaging, insulation, clothing, and building the partnerships to bring them to market for a post-plastic future.
Plastics are now everywhere, from ocean depths to the food we eat. Microplastics have even been found in human placentas, breastmilk, and organs, indicating our plastic addiction affects health and the environment at fundamental levels. Separately, British Columbia is facing a major wood waste problem, with only half of harvested trees reaching mills. The rest remains on the forest floor, fueling wildfires in hot, dry summers, turning forest waste into potential fire hazards, with slash-burning smoke.
What if these two distinct global and local crises could cancel each other out?
Dr. Feng Jiang, an associate professor in the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Stewardship and the Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Functional Biomaterials, has spent his whole life trying to reverse these problems. His research is devoted to deceptively simple questions like “What if I replace this [plastic] with a bio-based material? Would that still hold the functionality? Would that still hold the performance?” said Dr. Jiang.
From forest floor to frontline: 100% B.C.-made bio-foam
Dr. Jiang recognized abandoned forest leftovers as the raw material for something highly valuable: Cellulose, the structural polymer of plants. His lab turned this waste into a biodegradable “biofoam” derived from softwoods such as spruce, pine, and fir. A step towards replacing environmentally disastrous polystyrene (Styrofoam) in landfills.
And when Dr. Jiang brought his solutions to the table for Wet’suwet’en First Nation, a novel, unprecedented collaboration happened between UBC and Yinka Dene Economic Development Limited Partnership (YLP), Wet'suwet'en First Nation. After almost two years of collaboration, inside a new facility in Vancouver, the pilot is now operating as “ DicinFoam.” Dicin” means “wood” in the Wet'suwet'en language. “This manufacturing plant, in collaboration with the traditional forest industry, will economically revitalize the area and create local jobs for our community members who will spend their paychecks locally,” said Reg Ogen, President and CEO of YLP.
To mitigate the high production and commercialization costs associated with competing against a century-old petroleum-based polymer foam’s infrastructure, the engineering processes are designed entirely around sustainability: 1. Choosing benign, less toxic, and highly recyclable solvents. 2. Minimizing water usage and reducing chemical inputs wherever possible. And 3. Utilizing raw pulp and forest waste. The process is astonishingly efficient and turns the wood waste into a lightweight, compostable biofoam that degrades in soil within weeks.
An ideal T-shirt for the sustainable fashion industry
60% of clothing is made from plastic like polyester and nylon. Washing these releases microfibers and causes about 9% of ocean microplastic pollution. Dr. Jiang’s cellulose research extends to a cleaner way to spin cellulose into rayon-like textile fiber, cutting out the toxic solvent the process traditionally requires, to address the ecological catastrophe in the global fashion industry.
But this fiber is not a garment. To find out whether it could become something a person would actually want to wear, Jiang’s team partnered with Stephanie Phillips, the Sherman Jen Research Chair in Next-Generation Design at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, who tests this lab-made fiber by spinning it into yarn and knitting, weaving, washing, and dyeing it.
Phillips describes the UBC collaboration, refreshingly, as “the easiest thing ever.” Her lab is taking Dr. Jiang’s lab-made fiber and turning it into something a person would want to wear – like a T-shirt. She creates yarn from the fiber and then knits, weaves, washes, and dyes it to see how it behaves. It is painstaking and often slow, but that patience is key. “We’re taking the time to make sure we’re doing the right thing rather than doing it quickly,” she said. A deliberate contrast with an apparel industry built for speed.
The collaboration’s goal is to ensure new biomaterials, such as fully commercialized softwood-based textile fibers, and to offer a path to valorize B.C.’s wood waste, keeping higher-value production in-house rather than blindly shipping raw resources away.
A Feather-Light Fix for Packaging’s Plastic-Heavy Problem
The same principle of repurposing the overlooked biomass into a high-performance material drives another line of research in Jiang’s lab: a feather-light elastic cellulose aerogel.
Every day, millions of vaccines, reagents, and food move through the supply chain, mostly in expanded polystyrene coolers (EPS, or Styrofoam). EPS is a major pollutant that turns into microplastics and lasts centuries. Labs around the world are looking into Cellulose aerogels as a green alternative for EPS, but they tend to be brittle. Jiang’s lab made one with elasticity, the first-of-its-kind: an elastic cellulose aerogel that is light enough to rival down, tough enough to survive processing, and biodegradable.
This innovation became the basis of Baerfell Advanced Materials, a UBC spin-off launched in 2025. The elastic cellulose aerogel is a strong candidate as a warmer, greener alternative for cold-chain food and pharmaceutical packaging and multiple other applications such as building insulation from heat. “Because it’s really lightweight and has elasticity, it is a great choice for the insulated mailers that carry vaccines and medicines to remote communities,” said Dr. Jiang.
The Road Ahead:
Dr. Jiang's recent research reads like a catalog of new jobs for a single humble molecule: cellulose “ionogels” that switch between tough and stiff states for flexible electronics; color-shifting films that respond to humidity; hydrogels engineered as interfaces between the human body and machines; and nanocellulose used as a “bioink” for 3D bioprinting the basis of a UBC collaboration modelling human tissues, from tissue scaffolds to a bioprinted testis model built with stem cells. Or the collaboration with CAGE Innovations to advance green chemistry solutions across multiple industries, including textiles and adhesives, by leveraging food-grade chemicals. Dr. Jiang frequently works with colleagues at UBC’s Bioproducts Institute, a shared infrastructure of instruments, expertise, and funding is what lets a single lab pursue so many directions at once.
Both Jiang and Stephanie point to two shifts that must accompany these efforts: consumer behavior and policies, such as Extended Producer Responsibility laws gaining ground globally, that hold brands accountable for what happens to their products at the end of life. If British Columbia can align its world-class forestry resources with innovative university research, industrial ecology modeling, and equitable Indigenous partnerships, the province stands to become a global leader in the sustainable materials transition.
The solution to the plastic crisis might just be sitting right on the forest floor, waiting to be woven into the fabric of our future. For Reg Ogen, the horizon stretches well past economics. “This shared IP ownership [of DicinFoam] will increase and strengthen cultural, training, and employment community pillars that will benefit and make positive changes in the Seven Generations,” he said. He hopes the work draws more Wet'suwet'en youth into STEM, envisioning “professionals emerging from my community in forestry, engineering, and research.”
Every collaboration in this story—the co-owned technology behind an Indigenous-led company, the spin-off born from an express license, the partnership reaching across two campuses—moved from idea to impact through Innovation UBC, the university's front door for industry partnership, sponsored research, and company creation. For organizations ready to put UBC research to work on their hardest challenges, the door is open at innovation.ubc.ca.
