INTERESTING EXPERIMENTS.

Taranaki Daily News, 24 September 1921, Page 6

INTERESTING EXPERIMENTS.

NEW ZEALAND WOOD WASTE. SUITABLE FOE PAPER PULP. -Au enormous amount of wood is wasted in the process of converting the felled tree into mercantile timber. It has been estimated that in the United States alone, the quantity of wood waste produced annually in the sawmills amounts to 4000 million cubic feet Much of the wood at present wasted could be utilised for such purposes as the manufacture of paper-pulp, and the production of turpentine, aeet’c acid, and other products. The question has recently received consideration in New Zealand, and it has been suggested that the waste, in some instances, might be used for paper-mak- ! ing in place of imported wooi-pjilp. In order to ascei-tain the suitability ot certain New Zealand timbers for this purpose, an investigation has been conducted at the Imperial Institute, the results of which are recorded in the l current number of its quarterly bul.'ej tin. It was found that the timbers exi amined could all be used for the manui facture of paper' pulp, but whether such *an industry would be profitable in New I Zealand would depend on purely economic factors, such as the quantity <f waste wood available, its cost at* the pulp-mill, and the price, of fuel and chemicals, etc. Another article in the same bulletin deals with the problem of the commercial utilisation in cotton-growing countries of the vast quantities of cotton stalks which are produced each year and have to be removed from the fields after the cotton crop has been gathered. Investigation at the Imperial Institute has shown that the stalks form a promising material for paper-making and that they might also be used for obtaining acetic acid, tar and charcoal by a process of dry distillation.