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Woods Wisdom

Notes From All Over

By: Jim Petersen

“Almost anything” is the quick answer to the question. Solid wood, wood pulp and woodbased chemicals are found in more than 5,000 products—everything from floor joists to food additives.

But realistically, what can be made from the Southwest’s sea of small trees depends on which manufacturing technologies win public support. And although no one knows for sure what these might be, smaller family-owned businesses that make finished products, like furniture, seem to be preferred over large industrial complexes.

If this is true, it may be difficult to align the primarysecondary manufacturing chain in a way that facilitates efficient use of millions of tons of small diameter trees that now crowd the region’s forests.

For example, hundreds of secondary wood manufacturers, including high-end door and window makers, buy their raw material from sawmills that prefer to sell their best grades of lumber to value added manufacturers. Still other manufacturers live off the least valuable parts of the tree— wood waste processors for example.

No matter their market niches, the survival and prosperity of secondary wood processing businesses rest on their ability to buy raw materials at prices that include the imbedded cost of harvesting and initial processing. Imagine how much a gazebo would cost at WalMart if the manufacturer had to buy the logging equipment (at least a million dollars), harvest the timber, haul the logs to town (log trucks cost around $80,000) and do all of the sawing (figure $25 million for a good sawmill) and resawing work before the gazebo could be assembled!

Technology has changed the wood manufacturing business as much as any business on earth. Companies that just a decade ago were still sawing lumber or peeling plywood veneer from large diameter trees now employ advanced milling systems to glue, laminate and fingerjoin a variety of structurally superior products made from small diameter trees. Conventional lumber and plywood are slowly losing market share to these “engineered” products because they are stronger, easier to assemble, usually defectfree, perform better on the job and sometimes even weigh less.

In the transition from large to small diameter trees, log quality has become the more important factor. When quality is good it is possible to take trees apart and reassemble them in layers containing several trees of different species. As large wood billets—up to 60 feet by eight feet by two feet—they can then be re-sawn into anything from I-joist flanges to salad bowls.

With so much chaos in the nation’s energy markets, and so much dead wood in southwestern forests, wood pellet manufacturing plants would seem to be a good bet for even conservative investors. Arizona utility companies are required to generate a percentage of their power from solar energy and renewable fuels and the New Mexico legislature is contemplating a similar requirement.

Bone-dry pellets made from sawmill wood waste or ground up trees yield four times as many BTU’s per cubic foot as does unprocessed green biomass, which (by weight) can be 50 percent water. Equally important, when pellets are burned in technologically advanced stoves they burn so cleanly that they can be used on designated “no burn” days.

It is likely that federal funding for research in bio-fuels will be increased in the aftermath of this year’s fire season. Whether it is possible to make fuel from renewable wood as efficiently as it can be made from non-renewable petroleum remains to be seen, but if it is the technology will probably be perfected at Sandia, at Department of Energy research laboratory at Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Many observers believe the Southwest cannot begin to solve its forest health problems without a pulp and paper complex capable of annually consuming thousands of tons of forest residue. Whether such an imposing industrial complex will ever gain public favor remains to be seen, but its cornerstone presence would greatly improve the efficiency of the region’s harvesting and wood processing chain, spawning dozens more small wood ventures with whom it would surely develop customer relationships.

These small diameter logs are from a thinning on the Coconino National Forest west of Flagstaff. When quality is good, virtually any structural or panel wood product can be made from such logs.	This under construction home in Bigfork, Montana includes a wide variety of engineered wood products—floor joists, rafters and roof, flooring and wall panels—made from small diameter trees.
American Forest & Paper Association High quality wood chips are used mainly to make myriad grades of paper while lower quality chips are used to make packaging materials.	American Forest & Paper Association High quality wood chips are used mainly to make myriad grades of paper while lower quality chips are used to make packaging materials.
Forest Energy Corporation, Show Low, Arizona, uses these chips to make wood pellets for residential wood stoves.	Wood pellets made by Forest Energy Corporation burn so cleanly they meet EPA particulate matter emission standards.