No old-growth needed - timber; Longview Fibre Co

American Forests, Nov-Dec, 1993 by Earl Clark

This high-tech mill turns a profit with logs once scorned as "twigs" and help thin dogchair forests in the bargain.

While embattled Pacific Northwest loggers brawl with environmentalists over the future of the region's vanishing old-growth forests, a new state-of-the-art sawmill on the east slope of Washington's Cascade Mountains is proving that timber companies don't need those great old trees to survive. In fact, this mill saws up trees that the average logger would scorn as "twigs" and push into slash piles to be burned.

Among the points emphasized at President Clinton's Forest Summit in Portland, Oregon, last spring was that the Northwest's timber industry must shed its dependence on old-growth timber. But Longview Fibre Company, the Fortune 500 firm that built this mill, came to that conclusion four or five years ago.

Motivating that decision was the company's 80,000-acre tree farm, located about 200 miles north of its Longview mill on the Columbia River, sprawling across three counties on both slopes of the Cascades. Most of the tree farm's timber was logged off about 70 years ago and, typical of those cut-and-burn days, was not replanted, resulting in a forest that has grown like Topsy--dense and compacted, with a variety of species.

The traditional and comparatively easy answer would have been to clearcut and replant. But that would waste more timber than it would produce. "We studied it for quite some time," says Dave Bowden, the company's senior vice president for timber. "We didn't have a viable market for our tree farm. There were only two sawmills in the vicinity, and when they closed down, we decided to build our own processing facility."

Several other sawmills have been built in the state to handle small logs, but once Longview Fibre made the decision to build this one, it went all out. Consultants were hired to study the most advanced mills in the world, particularly in Scandinavia, which has nothing but small logs.

"The technology that supports this sawmill didn't exist in the United States 10 years ago," says Don Ledbeter, manager of Leavenworth Wood Products, as the mill is known, and an active participant in its planning and construction. "This is a whole new ballgame. We can handle logs down to four inches in diameter--nothing over 12 inches--and nothing is wasted. And we know exactly what we get out of every log that comes into the mill, down to the last grain of sawdust."

Built on a 40-acre site at a cost of more than $20 million, the sawmill marks a new venture for Longview Fibre, which operates one of the world's largest paper mills--12 machines producing kraft paper. The company already had a chipper mill at the site, a whistle-stop called Winton, which has the advantage of being within reasonable hauling range of all its far-flung tree farms.

The heart of the new mill is its Finnish-made HewSaw, one of only three in the nation. Logs go into the receiving end of the enclosed saw and are guided through by an operator punching instructions on a console that resembles an aircraft pilot's cabin. They come out the other end in boards of differing dimensions, including metric, ready for the trimmer and grading line. Integrated computers guide logs every step of the way through the mill--from the time they're dumped off log trucks and sorted into piles according to length, diameter, and species, to their emergence as finished timber. If a log is bent or crooked, no problem--the saw follows the "sweep" and turns out a usable board.

"The whole concept of this mill is to allow the use of logs that used to be left in the woods," says Ledbeter. Printouts show not only how much lumber each log produces but also the amounts of bark, chips, and sawdust, which are shipped to the Longview pulp mill. There the bark becomes "hog fuel," an energy source for the mill's steam boilers; the chips and sawdust are used for pulp making.

"We get a very high-quality wood out of these small logs," Ledbeter explains, "because the grain is tighter and there are smaller knots. In some ways, the product is better than if it were old-growth timber." The mill produces a variety of lumber, ranging from 1x2s to 8x8s, in lengths to 20 feet.

Computers even govern this final output. Under the direction of John Whittle, the mill's marketing manager, a computerized sales program constantly enters lumber-sales values. "We work with what's hot in the market," Ledbeter explains. "So if we find there's a demand for Douglas-fir 2x4s, we can deliver a million board-feet in a month."

The mill cuts up to 14 species of timber, which is then sorted into four groups. For example: western and mountain hemlock, grand fir, Pacific silver fir, and noble fir make up a "group sort," while Ponderosa pine is in a group by itself. As logs come off the incoming trucks--which are loaded with 100 to 120 logs each, compared with a dozen or fewer on trucks operating on the Olympic Peninsula--a computer operator sends them along a 600-foot-long, 46-bay sorter, which Ledbeter says is crucial to operating a small-log system. It sorts the logs by species, length, and diameter; logs over 12 inches in diameter are automatically deposited together in one bay and sold to other mills. The mill processes logs at a projected rate of 5,000 per 10-hour shift, with an annual production of 50 million board-feet.