The Forest Products Industry as an Environmental Movement
By David Otto
Reprinted with permission from September, 2000 issue of FTI Magazine

A book everyone interested in the forest products industry should read is Pacific Spirit: The Forest Reborn, by Dr. Patrick Moore. Moore, a founding member of Greenpeace, discusses in his book the great strides the forest products industry has made in recent decades in responding to the concerns of the environmental movement. For his troubles, Moore is now attacked as an "EcoJudas" by his former compatriots, but every day the industry he has taken to defending demonstrates that it has become one of the most environmentally progressive industries the world has ever seen. From harvest to final production, the forest products industry is permeated with an environmental entrepreneurism that has made the industry a model to be emulated. At every stage of the production process, the industry not only provides the wood fiber so much of the world's economy depends on, but does it in a way that treads lightly on the ground, improves the forest left behind, and makes full use of the resource at a level not even dreamed possible a few decades ago.

It is important that those in the forest products industry work towards promoting the environmental message, but all too often, each of us becomes insulated in our own job and fails to realize just how far our industry has come in building for a prosperous and environmentally sound future. With all that in mind, the following are presented as examples of just how far we've all come together.

ON THE FOREST FLOOR
At the harvest level all of the attention in the press in recent years has been on logging restrictions and endangered critters, but in reality, the real news from the forst floor is that immense strides have been made in developing technologies that both allow harvesting to continue, and improve the silviculturalists' ability to build towards a more healthy forest.

A well accepted, but little publicized fact is that the combination of decades of fire suppression in the forest and pressures from politically motivated environmentalists have created a situation in which the nation's forests have been turned into tinderboxes, ready to explode into firestorms that not only destroy trees but also sterilize the ground, making regrowth difficult or impossible for decades to come.

Two major advances provide examples of how the forest products industry has worked to improve forest health while continuing to operate and produce the fiber the world needs.

GIANTS WALK THE EARTH
The forest of today, especially in the American West, bears little resemblance to the forest that existed when the Europeans first arrived on the scene. Today's woods are crowded with small trees standing cheek-by-jowl on a forest floor that is littered with debris: a literal ladder for fire extends into the forest canopy. If the forest floor burns, the fire climbs rapidly up the fuel ladder into the crowns of the trees, and incinerates everything. The ongoing firestorms in the western U.S. have long been predicted by the experts as being the logical result of inattention to the forest.

By contrast to the forest of today, examination of early naturalist's notes, as well a early photos, reveal that the original forest contained only a small fraction of the trees the present forest contains. Periodic fires kept the floor relatively clean, burning out some areas and sparing others. Tthe largest trees were seldom harmed by the fires that burned away the understory as there was no fire ladder to climb. The overall forest was an unevenly aged mix of plants, some susceptible to fire, some not.

Today, in enlightened areas, cut-to-length logging has begun to take the place of fire in terms of thinning the forest and helping to make it fire resistant.

Using CTL techniques, firms like John Zapel's Holly Mountain Resources of Cle Elum, Washington, and Mike Reynolds Logging of Priest River, Idaho, utilize equipment produced by firms including Partek Forest, Incorporated, (The manufacturers of Valmet cut-to-length systems) to thin the forest, removing diseased and undersized trees, while leaving the residual stand unharmed, fire resistant, and able to grow bigger and better future trees.

Both Zapel and Reynolds use a combination of Valmet harvesters and forwarders to thin in unhealthy forests. The giant harvesters are capable of reaching out and delicately grasping a diseased or poorly placed tree, sawing it off, then delimbing and cutting the tree into the best combination of log lengths to provide the best quality lumber from the stem. The logs are stacked according to species and best use, then picked up by a forwarder, which loads them and carries them to a landing for transport to the mill. The machines move through the forest without the benefit of hardened roads, traveling (where appropriate) on brush mats made of the limbs of harvested trees so that soil damage is minimized.

After the cut-to-length systems have traversed a forest, the debris is either left to return to the soil or burned away to provide quick nutrient. Within a year the forest looks much like a park -- like it did originally -- and is capable of resisting fire rather than burning into devastation.

The measure of cut-to-length's contribution to the forest environment can be clearly seen in reports that some environmental groups are now hiring cut-to-length harvesters to treat their own forests, thus raising funds and improving the health and sustainability of their own land holdings.

PORTABLE SAWS DO IT ALL
One of the little heralded, but far reaching changes in the forest products industry in recent years has been the development of the portable band saw.

Portable band mills are small units that can be towed to the log and then used to saw lumber from the log by a one-or two-man crew. These saws are capable of producing up to 2000 board feet of lumber per day, depending on the species and conditions.

As an example of the impact portables have on the industry, it should be considered that one industry leader, Wood-Mizer, has more than 21,000 units in the field. If those units average only 1000 board feet of production per day, Wood-Mizer units alone are accounting for more than a billion board feet of production per year.

From an environmental standpoint, where that lumber comes from is important. Wood-Mizer portable band mills can be found in such places as landfills, sawing the trees removed as urban expansion takes place, and in the woods, sawing usable lumber from scrap trees that would once have been burned or buried to clear the way for replanting.

Examples of how Wood-Mizers are being used to recover fiber that would otherwise be wasted can be found in California where dozens of operators of portable units have banded with the state of California in an effort to build markets for California hardwoods, which represent billions of board feet of fiber availability using species that, in the past, were dropped and burned by softwood harvesters. In Texas, the portables are being used to create an industry based on mesquite, which must be removed to preserve native grasslands. The same is true in the northern and southwestern states, but the species is juniper, which is considered by the government, the environmental movement, and ranchers alike as a species that must be controlled to preserve native grasses and endangered species. The tree, which used to be considered an environmental danger, is now being cut, sawn into cants at the point of harvest using portable band mills, and then used to produce high-quality wood flooring and furniture lumber.

While saws like the Wood-Mizer portable band mills are little known outside of the forest products industry and barely known within it, an argument could be made that they have had more influence on environmental preservation than almost any other advance of the past quarter century. Certainly, the billions of board feet of lumber being sawn on them accounts for at least a part of the reason that the fiber shortages -- once thought inevitable as the forest products industry shrank in the years of the ecoterrorists -- have never come about.

GETTING MORE OUT OF THE RESOURCE --
WASTE REDUCTION AND ADDING VALUE
The industry has made huge strides at the mill level too. One industry specialist, Dean Huber of the Forest Service, points out that yield from a given amount of logs in the mill of today is about double what is was in the middle of the 20th century. That improvement has come as the result of advances at every stage of the production cycle. Lumber drying represents an important example of how advances in one part of an industry can bring huge environmental and economic benefit to the entire industry.

Throughtout much of the 20th century, relatively few milling firms kiln dried the lumber they produced. That was especially true, says Don Lewis, president of Nyle Dry Kiln Systems, of smaller firms. Today, Lewis points, that is all changing. New technology like Nyle's dehumidification systems, allows even small producers without extensive expertise to successfully dry lumber, making drhing the rule in today's mill rather than an exception as it used to be.

Lewis, whose Nyle Dry Kiln Systems is one of the industry's major producers of dehumidification kilns, points out that the ability to dry lumber provides huge environmental benefit to the forest products industry. First, he points out, in the old days when lumber had to be air dried because only large or specialty firms could kiln dry, huge amounts of fiber went to waste as wood warped, split, checked, or ended up with other defects as a result of poor drying technology. With modern drying advances, he says, less fiber has to be planed off of dry wood to produce a usable surface and less material must be cut from the ends of a piece of lumber to get down to a usable end. "Fiber is too expensive to waste," he commented recently. "Mills today, utilizing good drying techniques, are experiencing significant increases in output as a result."

Dry lumber is also substantially lighter than green, Lewis points out. For example, he comments, 8,000 feet of freshly cut red oak will weigh about 43,500 pounds, but after drying, it will only weigh 28,000 pounds. Since weight determines a truck's fuel use, load space, and wear and tear on roads, the reductions in weight the universal ability to dry lumber provides, is a very large environmental benefit as well as a big economic benefit to the mill.

IT'S NOT WASTE; IT'S A PRODUCT
No matter how finely tuned a milling operation might be, there is always residue that cannot be turned into lumber. Sawdust, slabs, and other leftover material used to be called waste, but in today's forest products industry, it is called product.

An example of how "waste," which used to be a costly problem, can be transformed into a valuable product is Todo Incorporated of Davidson County, North Carolina.

Davidson County is the center of a large furniture-making industry, and the mills that create the lumber used in furniture manufacture and the furniture companies themselves produce huge amounts of residue. Todco, owned and managed by Todd Warfford, uses a West Salem Machinery horizontal-feed wood hog to convert that industrial residue into a number of products, most notably mulch, which is then sold to nurseries, landscapers, and other purchasers for use in gardening and to provide ground cover.

In previous decades the material Warfford converts to product would have been hauled to a landfill, at a tremendous economic cost to the mills; or burned, with all the environmental degradation that brings. The availability of industrial grinders like Todco's West Salem Machinery unit allows today's mill owner an alternative that is beneficial to the mill economically, and to society in terms of the environment. As Steve Swain, the Davidson County recycling coordinator was recently quoted as saying about the West Salem Grinder and Todco, "We're adding a new cell to our landfill that won't come on line for several months. Without their contribution, we'd have been full long ago and would be shipping waste elsewhere."

AN EXAMPLE TO OTHER INDUSTRIES
In past decases the forest products industry took a good deal of sometimes justified, sometimes unjustified, heat regarding its impact on the environment. Anyone participating in the industry today however, should be proud of the advances the industry has made. There is no question that in the world of the new millennium, virtually no industry has done more to preserve, protect, and enhance the environment while, at the same time, building for the economic future of all the citizens it serves. That message needs to be loudly proclaimed by everyone in the industry.