Western states troubled by timber
by Tom Kenworthy
USA Today January 27, 2003
DENVER -- With federal land management agencies embarking on an ambitious plan to reduce wildfires by thinning 190 million acres of Western forests and rangeland, they face a vexing problem: What's to be done with all that wood?
Dozens of timber mills in the West have been driven out of business from a decade of declining federal timber harvests, combined with tough foreign competition.
And much of the wood to be removed from Western forests -- smaller trees, brush and branches -- has little commercial value for traditional mills.
"There's very little market for it now," says Marlin Johnson, a forest manager in the U.S. Forest Service's southwest region headquarters in Albuquerque.
Here on the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, the problem comes into stark relief. The Forest Service estimates it needs to remove 100 million board feet of wood in this area to help fireproof communities and create healthier forests. That would be enough raw material to build 10,000 homes, if it was the right kind of timber.
Yet Colorado has just one major timber mill. It's located in the western part of the state, 250 miles or more from many of the forests that need to be thinned. In fact, Colorado imports most of the wood used in the state, according to Dennis Lynch, a professor at Colorado State University.
Overgrown Forests
The thinning projects are ambitious federal responses to a problem building for decades in many Western forests. Aggressive firefighting efforts, combined with poor timber management practices, have allowed many forests to become severely overgrown with brush and small trees. As a result, fires in many areas are larger and more intense than they used to be. In 2000 and 2002, the region suffered two of the worst fire years in recent history.
Many of the projects underway or being planned will remove a mixture of large trees and smaller, less valuable material. The idea is that sales of the bigger, more valuable trees will help pay the costs of thinning, which can run up to $500 per acre. But steady declines in federal timber sales since the 1980s have dramatically eroded the number of timber mills. The sales decline has been driven in part by environmental concerns and successful lawsuits to protect wildlife and other resources.
In New Mexico and Arizona, for example, 15 large mills have gone under in the past decade. Those mills could handle 350 million board feet per year. Eleven mills remain, with an annual capacity of about 140 million board feet.
Having been hurt by declining federal timber harvests, industry officials are hesitant to invest on the promise that more wood is on the way. "The Forest Service has not been a very reliable supplier," notes Tom Troxel, a regional director of the Intermountain Forest Association, a wood products trade group. "Anybody would be pretty nervous investing millions of dollars into a facility that depended on national forests."
Federal officials are working hard to convince existing industries and entrepreneurs that a long-term thinning program offers them opportunities. Plans call for the Forest Service and Department of Interior to thin almost 3 million acres this year, almost 40% more than last year.
As the thinning program accelerates, the need to find markets for the material will become more acute. Because of the large volume and concerns about air pollution, burning the waste or putting it in landfills is not the answer.
"The first thing we have to do is try and provide some consistent supply of material and assure people there is a future in the restoration of our forests," says Bob Dettmann, who works on rural economic development projects for the Forest Service in Denver. "Once we do that, we can really sink our teeth into some innovative ideas."
Some Solutions
SBS Wood Shavings of Glencoe, N.M., may be part of the answer, say federal officials and the company's proprietors, Sherry and Glen Barrow.
The plant in south-central New Mexico uses small-diameter pine logs from thinning projects in the Lincoln National Forest and transforms them into shavings for animal bedding.
Customers in five states can buy the shavings at feed stores for their horses, pigs and hamsters. ''We have a niche market,'' says Sherry Barrow, one that gives a small boost to the local economy and also helps restore overcrowded, unhealthy forests.
Other innovative products and markets are under development. Many of them have been conceived and assisted by the Forest Service's Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis.:
* Using wood waste for small heating and electrical-power systems. The Forest Service is working with school systems in Walden, Colo., and Darby, Mont., to install units that will heat schools and provide power to light a hockey rink.
* Making building materials out of small-diameter timber. This can be accomplished through new processes that layer small pieces to make beams and other structural components.
* Using small-diameter branches and trunks called "round wood" for structures, rather than rectangular lumber that must be sawed. Information kiosks at the Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympics demonstrated the potential in using round wood as small as 4 inches in diameter, material too small to be milled into framing lumber.
* Combining wood fiber with re-cycled plastics to make decking and molded shingles that look like cedar shakes but also have fire-retardant additives.
Michael Ritter, assistant director of the Forest Products Laboratory, says he sees the potential in the nation's overcrowded forests every time he walks into a home improvement store. "How in the world can we be importing two-by-fours from Austria and selling them at Home Depot while we have this huge problem?" he asks.
For all the promise, building an industrial base large enough to handle the thinned material won't be easy. "My optimistic side says build it and they will come," Troxel says. "But right now, there is not the capacity to handle as much as the Forest Service is talking about."
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