70 The Forest Products Laboratory 



industry and almost every activity of the nation. Under present 

 methods of converting trees into pulp this industry is dependent for 

 its raw supphes upon three per cent of the standing timber remaining. 

 This is due to the fact that present processes are commercially adapted 

 to a very few species only. This accounts, in part, for the fact that 

 the pulp mill industry in the East and the Lake States faces exhaus- 

 tion of local timber within a decade or two, and the future of the 

 industry for the country as a whole rests upon the development of 

 processes which will make it commercially practical to use species 

 other than those now being used, especially western woods which com- 

 prise over 60 per cent of our remaining timber. 



The laboratory's work in the pulp and paper field has been 

 focused primarily in determining the value of our different species 

 for pulp and paper. More than 70 different species have been studied. 

 A process was recently developed, for example, whereby a high grade 

 book paper may be made from southern yellow pine. This process, 

 put to commercial application, makes available the southern pineries 

 as a source of book paper and thus relieves the drain upon the species 

 now used, the supply of Mhich is rapidly being exhausted. 



A further field of research work promising high returns, particu- 

 larly in the East where the industry has been long established, em- 

 braces the prevention of waste and the greater utilization of the timber 

 supply now available. It is conservatively estimated that with proper 

 research to develop increased utilization, our remaining pulpwood 

 su23ply will produce, unit for unit, double the finished jn-oduct that is 

 now being obtained. Present chemical processes applied to over 30 

 per cent of the wood used in producing newsprint, for example, con- 

 vert less than 50 per cent of the raw wood into paper. The remainder 

 passes off as waste. It contains valuable chemical constituents. 



Tremendous losses occur in the storage of pulp wood and of the 

 manufactiu-ed pulp. These losses are placed by the industry at about 

 $5,000,000 annually. They are due to fungus decay which the mills, 

 to date, have been unable to combat, owing to the lack of knowledge 

 of the fungi and their methods of attack, and of proper methods of 

 control. Within the past year (1920) the laboratory has made a study 

 of this problem in cooperation with the industry which has supplied 

 a large part of the necessary money to conduct the work. Preliminary 

 results indicate that much can be done to check the decay by applying 



