Natural Resources committee  Again, I think one of the keys—and the government has done a pretty good job at it to date—is supporting universities and research institutions to create new innovation. We are a licensee of technology, so we created the company—and that's not the single premise of our company. I

Natural Resources committee  Yes. The primary feedstock right now for our process is northern bleached softwood kraft pulp, or NBSK. Both Mercer and Resolute are major producers of this, but we envision our facilities being less linked to pulp mills and more linked to the end-user markets. Because we are cre

Natural Resources committee  We are still in discussion with industry. One of the reasons I'm back here east from Vancouver is that we just had meetings yesterday with two concrete producers, and we shared results with them from our latest study at UBC. I'll comment from this side as well that the nice thing

Natural Resources committee  Do you mean on a commercial-scale for producing our product, or getting it into concrete sites?

Natural Resources committee  Yes, we're developing our commercial plant. We've done the first engineering study, plus or minus 30%. We do expect the full engineering study and the capital costs to definitely be done by the middle of this year. We would build that plant ourselves.

Natural Resources committee  I rarely go on script.

Natural Resources committee  We do not specifically with the University of Toronto, but we do actually work quite closely with universities. Our laboratories right now are located on the campus of the University of British Columbia. We have working relationships with the Faculty of Forestry at UBC, and the D

Natural Resources committee  I think the collaborative model has the most promise, but we actually have a unique model where we're not just collaborating as a company with universities and research organizations, but have brought two forest product companies together to collaborate. Resolute Forest Product

Natural Resources committee  External validation is key, yes.

Natural Resources committee  We had some field trials just last year of large quantities, several hundred kilograms going out to the field for trials. We also had smaller scale trials where, in the plastics example I gave you, we're actually generating several hundred kilogram batches of our material in a co

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. I'm very pleased to be here today to speak on behalf of Performance BioFilaments as part of your study on the secondary supply chain products coming from the Canadian forestry sector. Copies of my remarks have been made available