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Utilization of Hardwood Waste 



Editor's Note 



The following article was read by R. B. Goodman of 

 meeting of the Northern Hemlock and Hardwood Manuta 

 article is an able analysis of the possibilities of closer uti 

 tical lumberman. 



First of all, I desire to call your attention to the fact that in 

 speaking of hardwood waste we do not mean an economic waste 

 at all, but simply despoiled or left-over material. If the produc- 

 ing of something valuable out of this material can be done at a 

 profit, it should be saved, but it must be remembered that the 

 waste material is something tangible and evident to the senses, 

 whereas the labor that may be expended in rendering this waste 

 material valuable is often illusive and intangible, and unless the 

 operation has an accurate system of accounting, the efforts to 

 save waste material may easily cause a greater waste of labor. 



The problem of utilizing waste material is largely a problem of 

 more efBcient processes of labor, and results are often so mis- 

 leading that all of us occasionally find ourselves handling waste 

 material in one way or another at an actual loss. The amount of 

 waste material, however, accruing from the manufacture of hard- 

 wood lumber is so great that we feel the necessity of making 

 some effort toward its utilization. 



This waste material takes place, first, in the woods; second, at 

 the mill; third, at the place the lumber is consumed. 



In this paper I shall discuss only the first two of these sources. 

 The waste in the woods is the greatest in bulk. Our specifications 

 for logging birch and maple are 8" surface clear for birch and 

 10" surface clear for maple. Since ■^ve adopted these specifica- 

 tions the value of birch and maple has increased over $5.00 per 

 thousand, and it occurred to me that this advance would enable 

 me to cut my logs on a much harder specification, both as to size 

 and character of the log. 



We made interesting experiments in this line. We rodueod our 

 specifications to 7" and up for birch and 8" and up for maple, 

 and included a fairly hard grade or No. 2 log. This difference 

 in the specification increased the cost of logging from $1.00 to 

 $2.00 per thousand. The smaller and rougher logs decreased our 

 cut at the mill some twenty per cent, with a consequent increase 

 in cost of sawing of that amount. The larger percentage of low- 

 grade lumber decreases the average value of the product of the 

 log, so that by endeavoring to utilize the poorer logs in our 

 forests, and thus to decrease the waste of material in the woods, 

 we virtually increase the cost of our lumber more than $5.00 per 

 thousand; and if we had had any means ■of determining the actual 

 cost of manufacturing the poorer logs into lumber, it would prob- 

 ably have amounted to four or five times the value of the product 

 obtained, so we have come to the conclusion that with our stand 

 of timber 8" and 10" surface clear limits for logging birch and 

 maple are the limits of economy. These specifications take not 

 more than from thirty to thirty-five per cent of the weight of the 

 wood from the land, or from sixty-five to seventy per cent of the 

 weight of the material in our forests is left on the ground as 

 having no economic value. 



The second source of waste material is at the mill — saw kerf, 

 slabs, edgings and trimmings. The modern band saws have 

 reduced the waste of saw kerf to less than half of what it was 

 with the circular saw — in other words, it has been reduced from 

 twenty per cent to about eight per cent. If anyone is sawing 

 lumber with a circular saw, he can save the price of a band mill 

 in saw kerf in a year's sawing. 



More careful sawing or the use of slab rcsaw has reduced the 

 waste of material from slabs, and careful attention to edging 

 and trimming, the use of odd lengths in lumber, the crowding 

 of wane and bark into low-grade cratinp; and box lumber has 

 still further reduced the amount of waste in sawing up the log. 



In hemlock, basswood and elm, a percentage of the waste of 

 slabs and edgings is utilized for lath and squares, but when all 

 these things are taken into consideration, there is still over a 



—32— 



the Goodman Lumber Company, Goodman, Wis., before the 

 cturers' .\ssociation held at Milwaukee, April 23. The 

 lization, considered strictly from the viewpoint of a prac- 



cord of refuse to a thousand feet of lumber. Approximately two- 

 thirds of this goes into fuel as sawdust and hog feed, and one- 

 third is available for other uses — that is to say that approximately 

 fifty per cent of the weight of the merchantable log goes into 

 lumber, thirty per cent into fuel, and twenty per cent into wood 

 available for other uses. 



If these percentages of waste are approximately correct, you 

 will see that the lumber produced from the hardwood forest is 

 fifteen per cent of the weight of the standing timber and that 

 this is under the most improved modern conditions of manufac- 

 ture. If the birch and maple yield sixty per cent merchantable 

 lumber against forty per cent No. 3, the merchantable lumber 

 would be approximately nine per cent of the weight of the 

 material in the standing forests. 



The utilization of this waste material so that we obtain a 

 value from it in excess of the labor expended on it, is a problem 

 with as many different solutions as there are different hardwood 

 operations. If the mill is located at a remote distance from the 

 timber and freight is paid on the logs, it is obvious that the 

 possibility of bringing in a greater proportion of weight of 

 material from the standing timber is largely reduced. Mills that 

 are located at a remote distance from the timber are usually in 

 large towns or cities, and the waste material at the mill is more 

 available for sale as fuel than for any other purpose. When 

 the mill is located in the heart of the timber, as our mill at Good- 

 man, we have found that after selling a small amount of our 

 mill waste for local consumption as fuel, we have reached the end 

 (if our resources, for the best prices that we have been able to 

 obtain in the larger cities for short wood have not compensated us 

 for the actual cost of handling same from the mill to the car; 

 and while we have made no experiments of our owb, we have 

 offered for the past four years, and are still offering, to finance 

 any reasonable proposition submitted to us for the manufacture 

 of our refuse into any of the numerous articles of commerce made 

 from small pieces of wood — all the way from dowel pins to pail 

 handles. All the propositions that have come to us, however, have 

 been impracticable, the cost of labor involved precluding any 

 possibility of profit, and while there are many specialties in 

 hardwood, such as broom handles, special material for the manu- 

 facture of furniture, agricultural implements, tenpins, billiard 

 cues, etc., nearly all of these specialties require not the refuse 

 material but the pick of the logs. 



We have tried to solve the problem of utilizing a larger pro- 

 portion of waste material in the woods, and practically all of the 

 waste at the mill in birch and maple, by erecting a chemical 

 plant at Goodman for destructive distillation. This plant is of 

 the oven type. Plants for the destructive distillation of hard- 

 wood in this country are of three types — the small retort plant, 

 in which the wood is packed in small iron retorts and then 

 charred; kiln plants, in which the' wood is charred partly by its 

 own combustion; and oven plants, in which the wood is loaded 

 on iron buggies and shoved into large iron retorts or ovens. Our 

 plant has six of these large retorts, each holding eight cords of 

 wood at a charge, or a daily capacity of charring forty-eight 

 cords of hardwood. This plant, with its adjacent wood yards, 

 system of track and the installation of boilers and pumps for 

 supplying steam and water, cost approximately $200,000, and the 

 preparing of chemical wood and other requirements of operation 

 require a working capital, in addition, of $25,000. The returns 

 from this plant, after a fair deduction for depreciation, show a 

 profit of between six and eight per cent, and the prices at which 

 we are supplying this jilant with hardwood leave a margin of 

 profit of approximately $1.00 per cord. As the compensation. 



