Where the Lumber Industry Fails.

Progress, Volume XVI, Issue 5, 1 January 1921, Page 114

Where the Lumber Industry Fails.

(By Robert G. Skerrett.)

Sawmill waste in the United States alone totals annually about 4,000,000 cubic feet of wood, and a good deal less than one-half of the original tree reaches the final consumer of the lumber!

Eventually the people of this continent are going

to have a very bad row to hoe, and much of the difficulty will be found due to the well-nigh criminal wastefulness incidental to our uses of the abundant raw materials which Nature has placed within easy reach of us. For years we have been industrial spendthrifts and it is doubtful whether we have yet grasped the lesson which the war should have taught us.

During the war the public was asked, as a patriotic duty, to save the fruit pits normally cast away in order that we might have the basic material from which to make a superior grade of charcoal for the gas masks of our fighting men. What would we have thought of the authorities if they had urged us to throw away the juicy meat of our peaches, plums, apricots, etc., for the primary purpose of getting the stones? And yet, in short, we are doing pretty nearly this very thing in many of our great productive undertakings.

It hasn’t yet dawned upon us that vast quantities of our so-called factory wastes are not, in truth, useless materials, but are deemed so simply because we have been deaf to the preachings of the chemist and blind to the profitable economies which the more progressive of the nations in Europe have been practicing for years. Merely because our mines, our forests, and other domestic sources of natural wealth have responded without stint to our increasing requirements, we have deluded ourselves in the belief that there would always be a plenty of these raw materials handy.

Just as we have learned during the war to be more mindful of our dollars—making the pennies count as they never did before, so, too, must we utilise hereafter more of our raw stuffs and call no substance waste until we have found that there is nothing to be gained in any way by some manner of utilisation. We cut down every year about 40,000,000 feet of lumber. There are losses in the forest, waste at the sawmill, and again, scrapping in the factory where the wood is worked into the forms familiar to most of us. The waste in the woods consists of tops and stumps and represents 13 per cent. The sawmill is the worst offender, showing an unproductive factor of 49.1 per cent, of the log. It is authoratively asserted that an average of only 320 feet of lumber is used for each 1,000 feet that stood in the forest.

The mill waste has a wide field of possible employment. The slabs, edgings, trimmings and other solid wood cut from the log can be turned into laths, map and shade rollers, chair stock, matches, toothpicks, woodenware, boot and shoe findings, brushes, broom and tool handles, boxes, crates, toys, etc., not to mention wood pulp for the manufacture of artificial silk and paper. It has been declared by one of the foremost firms of chemists, engineers and industrial managers that only about one-third of each long-leaf pine tree cut is ever merchandised. And if the entire tree were used, as it could and

should be, the long-leaf pine industry alone would contribute every day to the estate of the American people, 40,000 tons ot paper, 3,000 tons of resin, 300,000 gallons of turpentine, 600,000 gallons of ethyl or grain alcohol together, with the fuel of these industries in addition to the lumber we get now. According to these experts: “ These figures are not idle guesses; they were reached after exhaustive study and experiment-”

As wood, in its course from the forest tree to the finished commodity, is said to be subject to greater losses than any other important raw material, it behoves us to get busy and to stop this tremendous leakage. It is a matter of fact that many of oui sawmills have been paying, annually, for years considerable sums of money to have their waste piles removed, despite the fact that all of tnat materia, can be employed in a variety of ways and made to show a goodly profit. From the cast-on bark, tanning extract can be obtained, some of the refuse can be used directly for fuel in the raising of steam, and sawdust and blocks can be fed to gas producers to furnish motive energy for operative machinery.

Alcohol from sawdust is, chemically identical with grain alcohol and must not be mistaken for wood alcohol. By means of diluted sulphuric acid and metal digesters and other apparatus it is possible to get a high-grade alcohol from the so-called wood refuse—a yield of 20 gallons and more being realised from a ton of the dry material. Again, in the manufacture of sulphite pulp the spent liquor contains some sugar in solution. Sugar, as most of us know, is a prime source of alcohol. In three paper mills in Sweden the sugar content of tne sulphite liquor give about a million and a quarter gallons of alcohol per year. Abroad, a number of characteristics commend it. With us, until comparatively recently, very little, indeed, has been done toward effecting the recovery of alcohol from wood waste, but we are correcting this to a modest extent. Alcohol has many fields of usefulness in the industrial arts, and it is our duty to conserve all-