The Trend of Forest Industries in the Pacific Northwest

(Continued from Page ?0) put into these valuable products. The utilization of logging waste for the same purpose has begun, including the reJogging of slashings, after the saw tirnber has been removed,,to recover the material suitable for wood pulp.

And, just to illustrate the economic iirter-relations of such developinents, carloads of paper wrappers are shipped every summer to the apple-growing districts of Oregon and Washington, supplying their requirements with a product recovered from'the waste of Pacific Coast sawmills.

The use of slab-wood for fuel is, of course, an ancient and honorable adjunct of the sawmill to the extent stoves, grates and furnaces were within practicable reach. Now the sawdust burner has established its place among the comforts of home; and the conversion of sawmill waste into hogged fuel for domestic and industrial requirements has attained very large pfoportions.

Strange as it may seem, there'was a sawdust shortage in the city of Seattle last winter. In fact between the market for pulp chips, the market for hogged fuel, and now the market-for sawdust, the old familiar waste burner at the Pacific-Coast sawmill is passing into the discard at plants located near the large urban centers. In time it will disappear from our sawmill architecture altogether.

Aside from these direct conversions of sawmill and logging waste, the Pacific Northwest is witnessing a steady expansion in industries affiliated with logging and lumbering, which represent a constantly growing diversity in products and greater efficiency in the use of wood. Some of them affoid a market for short length boards and other waste products of the sawmill. Some of them afford a medium for refabricating or refining low grade lumber into high grade products. Some of them, like the production of veneer and plywood, represent a direct conversion of the log into products commanding specialized industrial mark6ts and opportunities for wider service from the forests of the Northwest.

The Pacific states, for example, produce about ten million doors annually and over two-thirds of all the softwood doors manufactured in the entire United States.

Thirty-three different species of woods, local and imported, are used in the so-called secondary wood-using industries of Washington. Their aggregate consumption exceeds one billion board feet of wood annually, over 97 per cent of which is native Douglas fir, hemlock, spruce, pine and cedar. There is probably no commodity manufactured from any softwood which cannot be made successfully from some one of our native woods; and the great majority of such commodities are now being manufactured in the western states. Douglas fir is employed in the production of more than two hundred articles for various Washington industries, ranging from pulleys and decoy ducks to furniture, cross-arms, cooperage, wood pipes, tanks and broom handles.

Sitka spruce is utilized in Washington in manufacturing some one hundred different commodities, ranging from toxes and crates, baskets and fruit packages, trunks and .suit cases to airplane construction.

And so we might go on down the list, with 80-odd uses for Western hemlock and another 80-odd for Western red cedar, and the many diversified uses of the western pines. The planing mill products of Washington, aside from those produced at sawmills, have an annual value of twenty mil- lion dollars. The box shook industry is an enormous one. The manufacture of automobile body parts has become an important factor in the fabrication of lumber and veneer. The'timber creosoting, or preserving, industry has become well established and is supplying a widening range of markets. Food containers of all kinds are being manufactured on an increasing scale. In fact you will find in the long list of commodities practically every wooden article required by industrial and human needs, from the toys of the child to the caskets which await us all.

There is more than a mere statistical interest in this picture of diversified forest products which I have attempted to draw and which you will see much more sharply by looking over the exhibit which has been prepared. It represents a genuine industrial development of outstanding importance to the Northwest. ft means a constantly increasing recovery and use of the timber resources of the Northwest. It means the expenditure of more labor and the investment of more capital in refining otrr forest products right bere art home, with all that that iignifies to the region in the growth of industrial establishments and industrial population. And it means greater stability in the economic structure built upon and around our western forests because our products are becoming more diversified and less dependent upon single markets or uses.

Beyond all that, it means more permanent forest industries. Let me cite here a single significant fact, taken from reports of the f)epartment of Labor and Industry of the State of Washington. The payrolls of the logging and sawmilling industries of this state reached their peak at about 1924. Since then they have declined by approximately $5,400,000 due broadly to the depletion of saw timber in certain portions of the state. But the combined payrolls of the logging, sawmilling, pulp and paper, and woodworking industries of the state have held up, in t98, to where they stood four years ago. In other words, the increase in pulp and paper manufacture and in wood-working industries has been sufficient to ofiset the decline in payrolls of the logging camps and sawmills.

Every other major forest region of the United States has suffered an industrial loss from the decline in lumber manufacture attendant upon the depletion of its virgin timber. No virgin forest lasts forever and a similar problem of maintaining industries when virgin resources decline will be faced by the Northwest states. Diversified forest industries, making many different products, utilizing raw material closely, spending more labor and machinery in its refinement, and producing an equal or greater aggregate wealth, represent the solution of that problem.

And looking still further into the future, the more industrial efficiency we develop in the use of wood for many different commodities, the greater value will we give to the raw materal. Hence will we orovide a more assured economic footing for reforestation and the perpetuation of the natural resources which sustain all wood-using industries.

So there is a good deal more in what I have tried to present than the making of broom handles out of mill slabs or putting shavings into your morning newspaper. These are just signs and symptoms of a far-reaching-econpmic progression. They signify progress tolvard stability in one of the great Northu'estern groups of industries, a stability that will not stop with the saving of waste or more efiicient manufacture, or better merchandising. It is leading toward an all-round industrial .set-up which will bring in its train the replacement perpetuation of the forest resources upon rvhich it is built.