Mater: innovator - Mater Engineering vice president Catherine Mater

American Forests, March-April, 1995 by Earl Clark

The ideas and energy of this Oregonian are turning woods "wastes" into makers of money and jobs.

An old saying has it that one man's poison is another's meat. If you apply that philosophy to today's hard-pressed forest economy, you might well learn that what the traditional logger regards as woods waste is money in the bank to a new breed of technologist.

A front runner in this fresh concept of making something out of what many still see as nothing is Catherine M. Mater, vice president of Mater Engineering of Corvallis, Oregon. A dynamic public speaker, she was selected by the White House as a panelist at the historic April 1993 Forest Summit chaired by President Clinton in Portland, Oregon. At that summit, according to one Oregon newspaper, she "came the closest to offering real solutions for helping to resolve the Northwest's timber crisis." In January 1994, the environmentally supportive John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation selected Mater as one of five worldwide experts to evaluate global forest-management and resource-development opportunities.

Mater's unique skills in identifying new manufacturing and marketing opportunities for the forest-products industry have brought her speaking invitations and contracts in the past two years from 16 states, Massachusetts to California, as well as Japan, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, and the Philippines.

"I developed it the hard way - on my own," Mater says of the expertise that has earned her this international reputation. "Traditionally, the forest-products industry has been based on how to utilize an available species - how to manufacture it and how to sell it. I simply reversed the equation. I start with what the consumer wants, what kinds of facilities and equipment are needed to meet those wants, and then what forest product will fill that need." Or, to quote from her firm's brochure: ". . . devising new engineering technologies and marketing skills to profitably manufacture value-added and secondary wood products (author's italics)."

"Value added" simply means making a finished consumer product out of a log or rough board - and in the process creating jobs, a major consideration in West Coast towns devastated by logging cutbacks.

"Secondary wood products" covers a multitude of forest growth that has been traditionally trampled, thrown away, or burned - like the prolific shrub salal, and bark, a byproduct that mills long ago learned to use as a money-earner rather than waste. Mater not only has shown the industry ways to expand its use but also has elevated to resource status such despised weeds as stinging nettle, horsetail, and devil's club, as well as lichens, mosses, tree tops, and twigs. Just about anything you run across in a stroll through the woods, she's found a market for.

Forest engineering was nowhere in her career plans when Mater, as an Oregon State University student, contemplated her future. She received her bachelor's degree in political science, intending to continue on to law school. As a graduate student she did legal research in the wood-products industry, which led her to meet and marry Scott Mater, president of Mater Engineering, a wood-products technology firm founded by his parents a half century ago. And it also led her to switch careers, going on to earn a master's degree in civil engineering at OSU, then devoting her considerable talents and unbounded energy to promoting a whole new outlook on how to best use forest products.

Her first big break came three years ago when the Willamette National Forest in Oregon's Cascade Mountains, its timber output drastically slashed by the spotted-owl/old-growth controversy, asked Mater to conduct a study of what forest resources other than logs might be marketable.

"It reminded me of one of my favorite movies: Robert Redford in 'The Candidate'," she recalls. "Once he was elected, he wondered: 'It's a great job - now what do I do?'"

By the time Mater finished her study, she had identified 40 to 50 forest products that had market potential. Then she focused on four (salal, Oregon grape, huckleberry, sword fern) that, she figured, could generate $72 million in income.

Since then she has developed more millions of dollars in new markets for secondary forest products - an amazing range of once-scorned weeds and scrap - and demonstrated how to get more value, meaning more profit and more jobs, out of a steadily diminishing number of trees.

Though her leadership has generated new business and employment, it's still a minor segment of the nation's timber business as a whole, and she is the first to concede that the technology she is pioneering still has a long way to go to win full acceptance from the industry.

"The toleration for my theories is still very limited," she acknowledges. "Many people think they're way out in left field. But the interesting thing is that loggers - the guys who work out in the woods - are the ones who show the most interest in value-added wood processing, because they can see what's happening to the resource."