SmartLam debuts new facility at former Plum Creek site

Cross-laminated timber manufacturer SmartLam is bringing production back to the Columbia Falls facility where Plum Creek Timber Co. and later Weyerhaeuser operated for more than 50 years.

In reopening the plant to produce a new-age, high-tech wood product, SmartLam’s reimagining of the historic manufacturing site looks a lot different than it did in 1964 when Plum Creek set up shop

“It’s a pretty technical operation,” SmartLam founder and CEO Casey Malmquist said during a grand opening event Tuesday as he pointed out specialized equipment.

Gov. Steve Bullock was on hand for the event, noting “this is not only important to Columbia Falls, but to the whole state” during a tour of the new manufacturing facility.

The Columbia Falls facility created 40 new jobs in the plant, and Malmquist pointed out local lumber manufacturing is responsible for the creation of numerous indirect positions as well, in areas like harvesting the wood and marketing the products.

Malmquist has been on the cutting edge of a new wave of building materials since founding SmartLam in 2012. After a career building homes with Malmquist Construction, based in Whitefish, Malmquist tapped into his industry expertise and his awareness of the area’s natural resources to chart a new course for construction. The product was cross-laminated timber, or CLT, a mass timber building material made from stacking wood panels together with an adhesive.

SmartLam was the first United States producer of CLT when Malmquist started the business, then known as SmartLam Technologies Group. With the company’s recent reorganization as SmartLam North America and expansion into Columbia Falls and Dothan, Alabama, SmartLam is now the country’s largest producer of the innovative wood product.

Malmquist touts CLT for being far more sustainable than building with steel or concrete, and it also makes for faster, more cost-effective construction.

“We can make everything from industrial matting, to residential, to high-rise buildings,” Malmquist pointed out. Most importantly, they can do it right in his backyard.

One of its biggest suppliers is fellow Columbia Falls company F.H. Stoltze Land & Lumber Co., and Malmquist said SmartLam also works with the Weyerhaeuser medium-density fiberboard plant in Kalispell to make use of SmartLam’s waste materials.

“We source as close as we can,” Malmquist said. “We try to be as least impactful as we can here.”

But SmartLam is certainly having an impact in the industry with its ultra-modern take on a classic approach to construction.

Over the course of two years, SmartLam retooled the Weyerhaeuser plant that closed in 2016 with state-of-the-art equipment, some of it specially designed by the company, to polish the process of creating CLT.

The high-tech manufacturing center includes features such as a massive high-speed door that can close rapidly to maintain the perfect climate control for the lumber inside, which is ideally kept in a precise temperature range that should only vary by three degrees Fahrenheit and five humidity points.

The facility is also decked out with a press that exerts pressure on a conveyor belt running at 25 mph in order to produce a long, continuous plank of engineered wood. “We could make a 2x6 to a 2x8 from here to Great Falls, if we so desired,” Malmquist said with a laugh.

The press also works to spread out the special adhesive that sets CLT apart from other building materials, and the mixture SmartLam uses has the added benefit of being non-toxic and formaldehyde-free.

“It basically is kitchen grade,” Malmquist reported. “You could eat it—not recommended.”

Attention to details like this are a critical part of the operation, even though it takes place in a sprawling 145,000-square foot facility. One of their machines, for instance, cuts wood to within one-sixteenth of an inch; another can fill gaps between layers of wood as small as 1/4000 of an inch.

“We have to get this very, very right,” Malmquist said. “This is very, very precise work.”

These minute details are a key part of a very large-scale operation. Malmquist said SmartLam has the capacity to feed about 65 million board feet of lumber into the plant annually and produce about 2.2 million cubic feet of CLT in the same time-frame—enough to fill the entire new facility.

He added SmartLam goes through a unit of lumber — roughly 14 feet wide, 4 feet long and 3 feet tall — every five to 10 minutes.

This impressive scale, and Malmquist’s innovative vision, are among the reasons SmartLam has positioned itself as the CLT producer with “by far the highest” output in the nation.

CLT is “a new product in a nascent industry,” Malmquist noted, and SmartLam’s Columbia Falls operation is still probably a few weeks out from running at full capacity.

But the site has room to add in more machinery “as production requires,” and SmartLam has its sights set on additional facilities in other regions of the country.

As far as Malmquist is concerned, the sky’s the limit. His vision is to eventually see towering skyscrapers built from Montana’s forests — “20-, 30-story buildings made of wood.”

Reporter Bret Anne Serbin may be reached at (406)-758-4459 or bserbin@dailyinterlake.com.