A new chair, vice chair and two new members have been elected to APA-The Engineered Wood Assn.’s Board of Trustees.

Ashlee Cribb, vice president of wood products for PotlatchDeltic Corp., has been elected to serve as chair on APA’s Board of Trustees, succeeding Roy O. Martin III. Cribb steps into this position after being elected vice chair earlier this year. Her areas of expertise include sales, marketing, strategic planning and operations management. Before joining PotlatchDeltic, Cribb was senior vice president and chief commercial officer for Roseburg Forest Products. She previously held leadership positions at Georgia-Pacific, including vice president of industrial packaging. She also has 21 years of experience working in the chemical industry at Imerys Performance Minerals and Solutia, Inc. (formerly Monsanto). Cribb earned an MBA from Washington University and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Doug Asano, senior vice president of sales & marketing for Roseburg Forest Products Co., has been elected to fill the vice chair position. Asano leads Roseburg’s sales, marketing, logistics, customer service and fulfillment teams. Asano joined Roseburg in 2020 as the director of sales excellence, focused on process and systems improvements and sales training. Before joining Roseburg, he worked at Huber Engineered Woods for more than 16 years in multiple commercial leadership roles, most recently as vice president of sales and marketing. He earned his bachelor’s degree in economics with honors from Dartmouth College and his MBA from The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

The two new members to the board include Stephen Williams, executive Vice President and chief financial officer of Western Forest Products, and Richie LeBlanc, president and CEO of Hunt Forest Products. LeBlanc is filling the vacancy left by Travis Bryant as Coastal Forest Products was purchased by Boise Cascade Company.

“The engineered wood industry, like so many others, is experiencing tremendous change,” says APA President Mark Tibbetts. “We are grateful for our volunteer leaders’ service to the industry and APA.”

While traditionally known as a sawmill show, the recent Timber Processing & Energy Expo experienced a healthy turnout from producer companies that also participate in the structural panel and engineered wood products sector, including the likes of ATCO Wood Products, Boise Cascade, Coastland Wood Industries, Columbia Forest Products, Freres Engineered Wood Products, Georgia-Pacific, Hood Industries, Hunt Forest Products, Murphy Company, Pacific Veneer, Pacific Wood Laminates, PotlatchDeltic, Rainier Veneer, Rosboro, Roseburg Forest Products, SmartLam North America, and Weyerhaeuser, to name a few.

The event, held September 28-30 at the Portland Expo Center in Portland, Ore., featured 170 exhibitors, 1,225 (non-exhibitor) registered attendees and another 900 exhibitor personnel. Produced by Hatton-Brown Expositions, an affiliate of Panel World magazine, the every-other-year event was last held in 2018, due to the pandemic canceling the show in 2020. It marked the fifth TP&EE since its inception in 2012.

“It has been the million-dollar question for the Portland show as long as I can remember: Should the structural panel industry receive equal billing as the sawmill industry?” comments Rich Donnell, Show Director and Editor-in-Chief of Panel World. “We have never promoted it that way, and certainly there was far more sawmill influence at this TP&EE, but given some of the comments we’ve received since the show, we’ll definitely need to look at it moving forward.”

More than 110 wood producer companies sent representatives to the event. Several TP&EE exhibitors, such Altec, Westmill, MDI, Samuel, Signode, Taihei Machinery and USNR, do considerable business in panel and EWP.

In addition to the exhibits on the show floor, one feature of the event that both panel and lumber segments enjoyed was the conference, From Forest to Frame: Mass Timber Developments, which featured 10 speakers, and which was followed the next day by a Mass Timber Tour of Freres Engineered Woods in Lyons, Ore. and TallWood Institute in Corvallis, Ore.

The conference included a panel discussion on Tracking and Transparency in the Forestry Supply Chain, moderated by Evan Schmidt, outreach and education manager, TallWood Design Institute. Also, Iain Macdonald, director of Tallwood, spoke on The Oregon Mass Timber Coalition—Connecting Oregon’s Forests to Mass Timber Manufacturing; Jeanelle Leafblad, senior director, WoodWorks, addressed Growing Market Demand for Wood Products; Allan Czinger senior account manager, USNR, spoke on Optimizing Sawmills for Mass Timber Production; Russ Vaagen, founder and CEO, Vaagen Timbers, talked about Mass Timber: From Early Adopter to Mainstream Buildings; and Derek Ratchford, CEO, SmartLam, addressed U.S. South Mass Timber Growth.

The next TP&EE is scheduled for September 25-27, 2024.

Mika Saariaho’s starting date as President and CEO of Raute Corp. has been specified. He will start in the position on October 1, 2022. On May 24, 2022, Raute announced Saariaho’s appointment and that he will assume his position at the latest on November 24, 2022. As announced earlier, Petri Strengell, who has acted as the company’s interim President and CEO since May 1, 2022, will continue in his role as the company’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) and member of the Executive Board when Saariaho takes over the position as President and CEO.