January, 1968 «

WOOD PRODUCTS ©

THE WESTERN CANADIAN LUMBER WORKER

THEIR VALUE IN OUR ECONOMY

The following article dealing with the forest industry is reprinted from the Royal
Bank Monthly Letter and contains a wealth of information which should be of particular
interest to 1WA members concerned about the future of their jobs.

It must not be forgotten in
this age of metals and plastics
that our forests are still the
basis for a very large part of
our prospertity.

The story of man’s progress
from a primitive cave-dweller
to the master of the civilized
world cannot be told without
frequent reference to his re-
lationships with trees. In his
earliest days the forest pro-
vided him with shade, shelter,
protection, food, clothing,
tools and fuel. In the Canada
of Centennial Year the lum-
berjack is still part of history
and life, a folk figure with
great influence on our pres-

ent economic life and our way
of living.

PUNY TOOLS

At the time when there
were only a few people with
puny tools settling Canada
the forest really seemed in-
exhaustible. With our increas-
ing numbers, our insatiable
demands, and our tremendous
engines and machines, the
situation is drastically differ-
ent. We have it in our power
to tear up our topsoil and
wash it away; to bulldoze
our forests; to pollute and silt
up our waterways, in only a
few years, leaving Canada as
a desert.

The word “inexhaustible”
is, therefore, an adjective
which should be used spar-
ingly with reference to our
forests today.

Planning and action are
needed if Canada is to retain
her position as a forest coun-
try.

PUBLIC CONTROL

As things stand now we
are in an enviable position.
More than half of our land
area is forested: only a four-
teenth has been improved or
is in pasture. More than half
of our 1% million square
miles of forest are capable,
under proper management,
of producing continuous tree
rops. Nine-tenths of these
Forest are owned by the peo-
Je of Canada, and therefore
a subject to public control.
. In the accessible and ae
ive forests some eighty
— pit of the merchantable
her is composed of coni-
fers, that is, evergreen soft-
pide The largest stands are
Ne British Columbia, Ontario
et in that order.
35 native conifer-
and 136 broad-

Rural Development book
Native Trees of Canada, avail-
able from the Queen’s
Printer, Ottawa ($2.50).

The softwood forests sup-
ply most of the wood used in
Canada, but the forests in the
east contain valuable stands
of hardwoods, such as birch,
elm, ash, beech, and maple,
that are widely used in the
manufacture of furniture,
flooring and for other special

purposes.

The value of products de-
rived from the forests is some
$2,700 million a year. The in-
dustries that use trees to pro-
duce lumber, pulp, paper and
other products, therefore
form an important part of the
Canadian economy. They em-
ploy many thousands of peo-
ple and their commodities are
exported in very large quan-
tities, thereby helping our in-
ternational balance of pay-
ments.

WOOD NEED

The need for wood is not a
passing stage in the develop-
ment of mankind. The ex-
panding world economy has
given timberland an ever-
increasing importance. Wood
in one or other of its myriad
physical or chemical forms is
indispensable to the produc-
tion, and utilization of just
about every product con-
sumed by civilized people. It
is a material for which there
can be no complete substitute.
From its crude state as fuel
to its highly sophisticated use
as a precise engineering ma-
terial, the tree brings benefits

and services to the human
race,

Wood is becoming more and
more a material for conver-
sion into other substances
from which finished goods
can be made, goods in which
its identity is not obvious.
By processing and by com-
bination with other materials,
it provides such things as
paper, rayon, cellophane,
photographic films, fibre
building boards, paper dishes,
artificial leather, cattle food,
eye-glass rims, fountain pens,
poker chips, insulation mater-
ial, toilet articles, cardboard
cradles which fold into flat
shopping - bag size packets,
and paper dresses that sell for
a dollar. The door of the
chemical utilization of wood
has been opened just a crack,
but there is evidence from the
research laboratories that
within a few years it will
swing wide open.

What is the tree from which
all these beneficial products
come? It can be described as
a woody plant attaining a
height of at least ten to fifteen

feet, rising from the ground
with a single stem, and de-
veloping a more or less defi-
nite crown shape. The sub-
stance of wood consists of the
major elements of plant life,
of which the principal is cellu-
lose. In the cell cavities are
oils, resins, sugars, starches,
tannins, dyes, inorganic salts,
and organic acids.

PIONEER DAYS

There are about eight
thousand sawmills, big and
small, in. Canada, supplying
lumber for a wide variety of
uses at home and for export
to every quarter of the globe.
From a small beginning in
pioneer days, when the manu-
facture of boards, planks,
beams and other usable forms
of wood was entirely a matter
of hand labour with axe,
hand-saw, sledge and wedge,
lumber production has devel-
oped into a highly mechan-
ized industry.

British Columbia produced
72.9 per cent of the total
Canadian output in 1963;
nearly a quarter of the total
is produced in Ontario and
Quebec, and the rest is spread
throughout the other prov-
inces. A few sawmills are cap-
able of cutting up to half a
million board feet of lumber
in a single shift; others are
small enterprises, turning out

five or six thousand feet a
day.

SAWN LUMBER

Sawn lumber includes
boards, framing lumber,
beams, posts, flooring, deck-
ing, sheathing, siding and
panelling. Sawn, hewn and
round timbers are used in
the galleries, shafts, drifts,
stopes and other parts of
mines. No satisfactory substi-
tute for wood has yet been
found for railroad ties.
Wooden posts are used exten-
sively for telephone, tele-

graph and electric light lines.

One provincial brief to the
Royal Commission on Can-
ada’s Economic Prospects said
that between 1955 and 1975
its number of men employed
in the logging industry would
increase from 16,000 to 22,000,
and that all forest industries,
logging and manufacturing,
would increase from 70,000 to
110,000. Canada Year Book
1966 gives the value of ship-
ments of all sawmill products

and by-products in 1963: $691
million.

Our pulp and paper indus-
try is one of the major pro-

ductive enterprises of the
world. As a maker of news-
print, its output is more than
three times that of any other
country, and it
about twenty-five per cent of
the world’s pulp exports.

More than 74 per cent of

the wood pulp manufactured
is converted to other com-
modities in Canada, the re-
mainder being shipped
abroad. Newsprint accounts
for about 75 per cent of all
paper products manufactured,
but there are many other
sorts of paper merchandise;
bags and boxes, paperboard,
building board, and roofing:
In 1965 the total pulp and
paper exports amounted to
nearly $1,500 million, equal
to 16.21 per cent of Canada’s
total exports.

PULP PLANT

Canada’s first wood pulp
plant was established as. re-
cently as 1864. Today, some
45 per cent of the free world’s
newspaper pages are printed
on Canadian newsprint, and

the demand is increasing so ~

rapidly that by 1980 produc-
tion is expected to be about
double what it was ten years

' ago. Canada makes three and

a half times as much news-
print as does the United
States. The largest Canadian
user is the Toronto Daily Star
and Star Weekly, with nearly
66,000 tons a year; then fol-
low The Sun and The Prov-
ince, Vancouver, 44,161 tons;
The Telegram, Toronto, 36,000
tons; La Presse, Montreal,
32,657 tons; The Montreal
Star, 29,800 tons and The
Globe and Mail, Toronto, 28,-
000 tons.

To produce this huge quan-
tity of newsprint, highly de-
veloped and intricate machin-
ery is needed. The newsprint
machine is a marvel of me-
chanical ingenuity. It is longer
than a football field, costs
about $10 million, and turns
out a continuous sheet of
paper more than twenty feet
wide at speeds up to half a
mile per minute while con-
trolling tolerances of ten
thousandths of an inch.

In the years 1958-1962 for-
est consumption in Canada
averaged 3,241 million cubic
feet annually. Of this, logs
and bolts for the lumber in-

furnishes '

dustry represented 43.7 per
cent; firewood and wood for
charcoal, 9.3 per cent; poles
and piling, round mining tim-
bers, and miscellaneous prod-
ucts, 1.8 per cent; logs and
pulpwood for export, 4.8 per
cent; forest fires, 8 per cent;
bolts for the pulp and paper
mills, 32.4 per cent. From
their one-third of the con-
sumption, the pulp and paper
mills created more national

revenue than the other forest
industries combined.

FOREST POLICY

Not so many years ago,
there was an abundance of
accessible and unoccupied
forest to meet the expanding
demand for pulp and paper.
Today, there are no large un-
occupied pulpwood forests
within range of existing mills
— and a mill worth $50 mil-
lion cannot be readily picked
up and moved to a new forest.
By and large, the mills must
make do with their present
limits. To make this effective
the industry adopted in 1946
a forest policy of perpetual
yield. The companies harvest
their stands of timber on the
assumption that a new crop :
of trees will be available on
the same site every 60 to 120
years, depending on the spe-
cies, and then they apply for-
estry art and science, plan-
ning, protection and good
sense to the task of making
this assumption come true.

SAWMILL CHIPS

In addition to introducing
improvements in forest man-
agement, the pulp and paper
industry is making more eco-
nomic use of its wood
resources. Wood suited to
pulping goes to the mill for
manufacture; other trees are
converted into plywood; saw-
logs become lumber; and the
residue of the sawmilling is
converted into chips for
chemical pulping. In British
Columbia, the wood residue
from sawmills accounts for
wood requirements of the
pulp and paper mills.

See “WOOD PRODUCTS”—_p, g