BOTANICAL ASPECTS OF PAPER-PULP AND TANNING INDUSTRIES 519 



grandiflora, evergreen magnolia 



virginiana, sweetbay 

 Nyssa aquatica, water gum 



sylvatica, black gum 

 Populus spp., Cottonwood 



balsamijera, balsam poplar 



grandidentata, large-toothed aspen 



tremuloides, trembling aspen 

 Quercus spp., oak 

 TUia americana, basswood 

 Ulmus americana, elm 



Hardwoods today account for nearly 70 per cent of the growing forest 

 volume in the eastern United States, and greater pulping use of them in the 

 future can be expected as softwood supplies are depleted and pulping prac- 

 tices are still further improved. 



Agricultural residues. America has long been so richly endowed with 

 an abundance of raw material that little thought was given, until recent 

 decades, to the utilization of industrial wastes. These include an annual ac- 

 cumulation of some 250 million tons of agricultural residues — straws, stalks, 

 stems, hulls, cobs, nutshells, fruit pits, and sugar-cane bagasse. Considerable 

 investigation has been devoted, particularly at the four Regional Research 

 Laboratories of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, toward converting each 

 of these categories into useful commodities, and the success achieved in some 

 of them has been noteworthy. 



Among such products have been fine bleached papers and boards, made, 

 respectively, from wheat and rye straws and bagasse. Particularly impressive 

 has been the conversion of flax stalks into cigarette paper, a development 

 which strikingly illustrates that political upheaval, international turmoil, and 

 the resulting economic disruption may lead to new plant-utilizing industries 

 and to consequent liberation from foreign sources of raw material. 



Up to World War II, American cigarette manufacturers had been annually 

 importing about 10 million dollars' worth of paper in which to wrap their 

 200 billion yearly output of fumatory rolls. Only flax fiber is suitable for such 

 paper, less than one-thousandth of an inch in thickness, and only Europe 

 could furnish the fiber, not direct from the flax fields which grew it but in 

 the multitudinous bales of long-used and oft-washed linen rags that accumu- 

 lated in France, Italy, Poland, the Balkan Peninsula, and elsewhere on the 

 Continent. France had a monopoly on the conversion of these rags into fine 

 papers and was the supply source for 90 per cent of the paper in American 

 cigarettes. 



One of the French factories, at Troyes in northeastern France and catering 

 exclusively to American markets, was operated by an American citizen, Harry 



