644 



Yearbook^ of Agriculture 1949 



as important to our national economy. 



Without quite yet realizing it, we 

 have become so desperately dependent 

 upon our forests that failure to get the 

 maximum use from the annual timber 

 harvest becomes increasingly vital. 



Is this unused wood close to loca- 

 tions where it can be put to use? Just 

 why does a waste occur? Are we mak- 

 ing any headway in efforts to use it? 



RESIDUE occurs everywhere that 

 wood is utilized to make things, but 

 much of it is in remote and scattered 

 locations. It happens for various rea- 

 sons. One of the most basic is that na- 

 ture did not design trees wholly, or 

 even primarily, for man's use. Nature 

 made them round, partially defective 

 usually, with buttressed butts and with 

 much of their content in branches and 

 tops. We use only the round trunk, as 

 a rule, and for the most part saw it 

 into strips with squared edges to re- 

 move the bark, although veneer is 

 peeled off like paper from a roll and the 

 pulp-mill chippers swallow the whole 

 barked log. But even the trunk has 

 knots and some other defects which, for 

 many purposes, must be cut out. 



The most obvious accumulations of 

 material discarded in processing occur 

 at small sawmills, although back in the 

 woods there may be even more. To the 

 layman, the great heaps of sawdust 

 and other scrap at the sawmills loom 

 as an impending evil and a bad waste. 

 The fact is, however, that those piles 

 of refuse are in large part unavoidable 

 even with the most efficient sawmill 

 equipment. The finest saw inevitably 

 chews up some of the wood as it bites 

 through the log. 



At sulfite pulp mills, only the cellu- 

 lose in wood is extracted for manufac- 

 ture of high-quality book and maga- 

 zine paper, rayon textiles, plastics, and 

 other chemical products. Roughly, a 

 third of the chemical constituents of 

 wood, known as lignin, are discarded 

 because there is no good use for them. 

 Lignin has thus far defied the efforts 

 of a small army of chemists to make 

 much profitable use of it. Not only is it 



unused; it pollutes the stream into 

 which it is dumped. Some cellulose 

 fiber is lost with the lignin. 



At first glance, rotary-cut veneer, 

 from which most softwood plywood is 

 made, looks like an efficient way to 

 utilize logs. Veneer bolts are mounted 

 on a lathe that rotates them while a 

 stationary knife cuts off a continuous 

 ribbon of veneer. But logs are not per- 

 fect cylinders of perfect wood. A good 

 deal of veneer has to be removed piece- 

 meal before the log becomes a cylinder 

 that yields a continuous sheet of veneer 

 as it revolves against the cutter blade. 

 Knots, cross grain, and other defects 

 take a heavy toll, and, finally, there is 

 the unused core of the bolt, which is 

 too small for veneer cutting. By the 

 time the veneer is clipped, trimmed, 

 graded, patched, and otherwise read- 

 ied for the plywood presses, some 40 to 

 50 percent of the log has been lost. 



These and related products in- 

 cluding railroad ties, cooperage, mine 

 timbers, shingles, and on down to 

 tongue depressors and pencil slats 

 make up the output of the wood-using 

 industries. In total, the discarded ma- 

 terial from these industries bulks almost 

 fantastically large each year. 



Follow the lumber from the sawmill 

 and you find still more loss. There are, 

 for example, the cut-offs and degrade 

 that result from seasoning. As lum- 

 ber dries, considerable amounts are 

 checked, warped, split, and honey- 

 combed. Knots loosen and fall out. 

 Some of the lumber becomes infected 

 with decay. At the planing mill, more 

 sawdust and shavings; at the building 

 site, discarded ends, broken pieces, and 

 warpage and splitting due to faulty 

 handling and piling. In the furniture 

 factories and millwork plants, the same 

 processing residues occur. 



A hundred million tons of unused 

 wood each year 60 million tons of 

 cellulose in a cellulose-hungry world 

 constitutes an almost untouched back- 

 log of raw material that challenges the 

 ingenuity of Americans. 



After the piles have been out in the 

 weather for a short time they become 



