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Calaveras Healthy Impact Product Solutions (CHIPS)
Location: San Andreas, CA
*Sierra Nevada Region - Central (Calaveras County)
Contact: Virginia Landreth (209) 498-3003 wp-chips@hotmail.com
Project Stage: Active (Stage 1 of Multi-year)
Next Milestone: Date Event What is now Calaveras Healthy Impact Product Solutions (CHIPS) was conceived at a West Point community meeting attended by over 100 people, to brainstorm how to successfully deal with a suite of social, economic, and environmental issues exacerbated by the closing of eight area lumber mills.
The community created CHIPS as an organizing structure to build on existing job skills of displaced workers, and find new uses and markets for natural assets. CHIPS technical feasibility and marketing study produced a new two-stage regional multi-disciplinary business plan that links businesses, government, and non-profit organizations to locally source small diameter wood and underbrush from private and public lands, and manufacture and sell value-added forest products.
In the first stage, CHIPS builds on displaced, returning and new workers’ skills in truck driving and heavy equipment operation, bookkeeping and clerical skills, training them to adapt to a new sustainable business model. The project generates revenue from sale of landscape and heating chips and mulch by diverting forest residual material from the local waste stream with a stationary chipping project at a local transfer station. One of its customers is Sierra Fresh Organics, which uses the chips to fire a 4-acre greenhouse, enabling it to provide fresh local produce at snowline. Chipping crews also secure materials for CHIPS second stage activities, which will include two new industry components in addition to manufacturing value-added posts and poles, and craftsman woodworking products.
For its second stage, CHIPS has applied for Biomass Conversion Technologies Technical Assistance funding to build a facility for wood densification and manufacture products made from densified wood, and to generate energy for the operations by burning wood chips in a clean-burning biomass plant. The biomass plant is designed in Holland.
The CHIPS project remains community-driven, and now has diverse agency and organizational partners including Central Sierra RC&D, USDA Rural Development, USFS, Calaveras County Public Works and Probation Dept., Sierra Forest Legacy, Mother Lode Job Training, the California Indian Manpower Consortium and several Tribal Councils. For more about: Similar Businesses and Organizations:
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