980 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



mechanically, and did he not have sawdust some other fuel would have 

 to be provided at an increased cost. At many sawmill plants not only 

 is all the sawdust used as fuel, but, in addition, planing-mill refuse; 

 and often it is necessary to grind slabs and edgings into fine fuel in 

 order to provide material for keeping the fires going at night and during 

 Sundays and holidays. 



Sawdust is not a waste, since fuel is an essential, and sawdust is the 

 cheapest fuel available to the manufacturer. If the sawdust-disposal 

 problem was the only one now confronting the lumberman, he would 

 long ago have ceased to worry. 



"In our Southern States the wastes of longleaf yellow pine alone 

 would produce every day forty thousand tons of paper, three thousand 

 tons of rosin, three hundred thousand gallons of turpentine, six hundred 

 thousand gallons of ethyl alcohol, together with fuel sufficient to meet 

 the requirements of all the industries that could produce these products." 



I do not have available facts to prove or disprove this statement, yet 

 it is probable that in making this estimate the author has grouped all 

 southern pines together, large-plant refuse and small-plant refuse in- 

 discriminately. So far as I know, it has not yet proved profitable in 

 many cases to even distil longleaf pine stumps, which contain a greater 

 resin content than either shortleaf or loblolly pines and a greater resin 

 content than slabs or top wood of longleaf pine itself. Further, it re- 

 quires large quantities of raw material to make these by-product plants 

 successful ; hence the refuse from the thousands of small mills is not 

 available, since the expense of collecting and transporting the raw 

 product to a central plant is prohibitive. 



The author asks why bankers, who have a highly developed faculty 

 for making money, do not turn to the forest instead of the automobile 

 and munitions factories for investment purposes. They do not for 

 many exceedingly good reasons. There is money to be made in auto- 

 mobiles and munitions, but the man who has made money out of the 

 refuse of southern yellow-pine forests is hard to find, not because men 

 have not tried it, for they have, but because it costs more to manufac- 

 ture a greater part of this refuse into a salable commodity than the 

 public is willing to pay for it. There are isolated cases where, under 

 especially favorable conditions, paper and products of distillation are 

 recovered from sazvmill refuse; but so far no one has devised a means 

 whereby rough tops and the limbs of southern yellow pine can be manu- 

 factured into a product at a reasonable profit. Processes for doing 

 this are known, but costs are prohibitive. 



