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Hokitika Guardian, 10 September 1929, Page 4

The Progress Leaguo has decided to open negotiations with the Government regarding the mater of establishing wool pulping works on the West Coast, It appears that private enterprise is prepared to shoulder this large undertaking, if certain rights can be secured. Negotiations have been In hand for some months with the authorities, but apparently reached an impasse. The League is taking the matter up from the industrial point of view, and has asked the Government to send down an officer to discuss details and see exactly where there are points of difference, and just what can be done to overcome them, so that an undertaking so valuable to the Coast community can be undertaken. There is such a wealth of timber country along the Coast, that the district is an ideal one for an enterprise of the character referred to. In times past the Coast has been suggested as a very suitable ’ location for a wood pulping works, and experiments with local timbers sent Home for the purpose, have produced, very good and suitable papers. There is of course a market for such a commodity in New Zealand, whiqh is now importing year after year, great quantities of. paper manufactured chiefly in the Northern Hemisphere. > If. it is possible to produce a suitable quality of paper, here on an economic basis, it surely is wise to create the industry, more especially. as in the ordinary circumstances on each milled area, there is so great a quantity of wasted timber. If it is possible to recover that waste, and utilise it for commercial purposes, as the promoters .of the scheme aver is possible, then surely it. is very remiss, to put it mildly, that so great an opportunity is being dallied with and likely to be lost if something is not done shortly. The proposal at present is to discuss a general scheme for the economic working of the waste timber on the millers’ areas and, in adjoining bush, and it is only a matter of securing a reservation large enough in content area to assure the industry being started. A large extent of country is required but as the West Coast lias a narrow seaboard, and is well served by rail over the area being worked for milling, it should be possible in the Grey and Westland Counties to embrace an. areni sufficient to provide ample supplies of suitable timber for the project. The scheme is one which New Zealand in its present state of unemployment should consider most favourably. Another and important avenue for employment would be created and would have a far-reaching effect for the production would supplant supplies which are now being imported into the country. The project is of undoubted value to the Dominion as a whole in the light of its possibilities, and to delay it unduly with capital anxious to enter up on the undertaking is not at all in the interests of the country as a whole.