From disuse to wealth: Japan’s new forestry ventures

In Japan, forest accounts for around 70% of the entire land area, and the number comes third in the ranking of OECD countries, after Finland and Sweden. From the perspective of sustainability, these forests have multiple ecosystem benefits for both human and nature, such as, disaster prevention, material production, and environmental and biodiversity protection.

However, the relatively undeveloped forestry industry has resulted in problems of unmanaged forest. As a matter of fact, forest management (e.g. thinning and reforestation) has a crucial role, in order to gain the above-mentioned multiple benefits of forest. Therefore, at the national level, the activation of the forestry industry and the adequate use of natural resources from forest is aimed for, in current society in Japan.

Here, let’s focus on some practices contributing sustainability from this perspective of forest.

Hidakuma: utilization of broad-leaved trees

One of the huge issues regarding unmanaged forests can be attributed to the broad-leaved trees, which accounts for around half the area of Japanese forests, because these trees are usually not used for industrial purposes in Japan and likely to be abandoned. The forest in Hida city, where an innovative company Hidakuma is based, is also one part of these forests.

Launched in 2015, this company does not have specific types of services and products, but instead, they facilitate projects collaborating with other organizations toward sustainable value creation from the forest. The company owns 20ha of their own broad-leaved forest, and operates various activities, including research, experimental projects, and events held in their platform place, FabCafe Hida.

In their recent projects, they have developed several projects to effectively use wood material from broad-leaved forest for architecture and furniture, cooperating with companies, city governments, and even a university.

meet tree: tree and cosmetics

“meet tree” is a botanical cosmetic brand launched by Wood Maruyama Holdings, a group operating multiple businesses ranging from forest management and wood wholesaling to hotel business.

Their unique idea can be seen in their use of branches and leaves (from Hinoki cypress), which were previously wasted. They use an essential oil from these materials, which has a relaxing scent and some good effects for our health, such as sanitizing.

We think their unique products can have a potential to introduce the importance of forest and its management to us consumers, who often live far away from forests and cannot directly realize their benefit.

eFON group

The benefits from forests are not always visible. Due to the fact, wood chips (one form of biomass) can be considered as a renewable energy resource that has environmental benefits, if its supply carefully considers environmental impacts mainly caused by material harvesting.

The good way of this is considering local or domestic material supply, and eFON group is operating a unique renewable energy business, along with their management of their own forest, focusing on using locally supplied wood chips. They offer Japanese organizations an environmentally-friendly electricity supply (with a certificate) that can meet the criteria of the global and domestic environmental initiatives, such as RE100 and Re Action.

In their website, they explain about the reason they choose wood chips for electricity resources as “utilizing wood (and forest) resources.” By doing so, they believe they can even contribute to the development of the forestry industry and sustainable (local) economy.

We will look at more fundamental forestry-related businesses (e.g., house and furniture production) that are seeking for sustainable change in Japanese forests in the next article.