Wood waste focus of study
N. Anson sawmill part of project to find efficient use
Copyright © 2003 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
Thom LaBrie is appalled at the amount of wood wasted by the average Maine sawmill.
Oh, sure, it gets turned into chips for pulp or to feed a boiler, but LaBrie says much of that wood can be turned into more useful — and valuable — products. LaBrie's Auburn Enterprises Inc. has received a $296,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to prove its point.
The Lewiston company will use the money to set up a wood recovery pilot project at the Cousineau Lumber Co. sawmill in North Anson later this year.
It is the second grant Auburn has received to promote better log utilization. It received $50,000 for a demonstration project that involved combing through chipper-bound wood at sawmills and turning what they saved into good boards.
"We averaged 38 percent recovery," LaBrie said. "Now we're going into a real mill and really start to take the under-utilized wood and put it into a value-added product and market it.
"I want to show that a mill can generate more product and revenues from an existing resource, that if the mills utilize it better they're going to develop a reputation as environmentally friendly and therefore more interesting to the 'green' marketplace," he said.
LaBrie believes that could help stem a tide of mill closures and help rejuvenate one of the state's foundation industries.
Some 30 Maine sawmills and turning operations have been closed or mothballed over the past five years, according to Peter Lammert, the Maine Forest Service's utilization forester
Auburn Enterprises, and its predecessor company, Auburn Machinery, once designed molders and planers. For the last 10 years the focus has been on designing machinery that makes better use of wood — machines that finger joint small pieces into larger ones, or resize slab wood that would be otherwise chipped.
"I'm a firm believer that we should be using more wood than we are now," LaBrie said. "But we need to be managing the resource more intelligently and responsibly.
"Talk about environmentally friendly. There isn't another material on earth like wood. It's renewable, biodegradable, recyclable, 100 percent usable, and nontoxic. What we want to do is show that the wood products industry should be growing, not declining, for all the right reasons.
"Maine has a lot of wood, a work force that's been doing this for generations and has a reputation as craftsmen. Add that up. Then look at the demand for environmentally friendly products and Maine is in a perfect position to capitalize on that.
But one of the stumbling blocks is the waste — LaBrie prefers the words "recoverable wood" — and the industry's reliance on the notoriously fickle chip market to absorb its ultimate byproduct.
"The industry as a whole believes that God made chippers to take care of waste. They don't want to deal with a piece of wood that's short, narrow or thin," he said. "But for every sawlog you handle correctly you can create more products, more revenue and more value-adding jobs.
LaBrie hopes to have his so-called RVA, or recovery value added, project up and running next month and to have proved his point within a year.
About $60,000 of the grant will go to pay for machinery, the rest for labor, trucking costs, drying costs, and marketing of the finished products.
Initially the program will focus on recovering the Cousineau mill's waste wood, then expand to taking wood from other mills within a 50-mile radius.
A third phase would involve putting recovery equipment in satellite mills, so that only resized boards, not the wood waste, would be transported.
Cousineau Lumber President Randy Cousineau agrees that "every bit of added value we can get is better than nothing."
But he says simply squeezing more value out of logs won't save the wood industry, it will take tariffs or duties to counteract low manufacturing costs in developing countries.
"It's a baby step, but it's not an entire step," Cousineau said.
But Lammert said getting an extra 2 percent to 3 percent out of a log "might be the difference between getting by and falling behind" for many Maine mills.
Still, mill owners want hard figures showing what better efficiency will mean to their operations, he said, and the Auburn Enterprises project should help do that.
Crucial to the project's success will be proof that the company can sell what it creates out of what would have been waste, Lammert said.
For that reason, the North Anson pilot project will have a big marketing component.
LaBrie said his company trademarked a "Maine-made and green" slogan and has been working to make inroads into the growing demand for environmentally friendly products. LaBrie says the green building industry alone is worth $130 billion a year already.
"We're saying there's a tremendous opportunity here. We just need to shake off the negativity.
Joe Rankin — 474-9534, Ext. 341
jrankin@centralmaine.com