Timberlink CEO Ian Tyson, last Tuesday welcomed Guy Barnett, Tasmanian Minister for Resources, to Timberlink’s Bell Bay mill to see recent investments in technology and safety upgrades in action. Timberlink enters the new decade strongly positioned for growth supported by the investments in upgrading the Bell Bay Mill.

The installation of new state of the art Contra Flow Kilns (CFK), will cut down waiting times for drying timber, whilst decreasing heat power usage by 30%. A new Lucidyne grade scanner that uses state of the art AI technology to measure for strength, quality and defects in every piece of timber in real time has been installed in the planer mill. The system’s software learns with every photo that it takes, scanning up to two boards per second. This ensures that every piece of engineered structural timber meets the stringent Australian standards requirements whilst removing the need for manual intervention, creating a safer workplace for our people.

Minister Barnett was impressed with the efficiency gains provided by the new CFK and Lucidyne grade scanner, the first of its type in Australia. “This is a great example of Australian manufacturing in the 21st century, in Tasmania delivering improvements in energy usage and safety through technology”, Minister Barnett said.

A new automated packaging line that robotically places bearers under packs of timber has also been installed, which Ian Tyson explained will alleviate a bottleneck to improve efficiency and output. In addition, there have been upgrades to the roads network to separate heavy plant equipment from smaller vehicles. “This is a great outcome for improved safety, so our people go home safe, every day”, said Mr Tyson.

The latest round of investment in upgrading the Bell Bay mill created 90 jobs in the construction phase and crucially 6 new permanent full-time jobs. The investments also support the long-term future of the mill and the estimated 650 jobs that directly and indirectly rely on the mill. “This is a terrific investment in technology and equipment in regional Tasmania here at Bell Bay, in a facility which is state of the art, that is value adding, downstream processing, creating jobs and it’s sustainable” said Minister Barnett.

Mr Tyson added, “Timberlink has continuously invested in this mill to ensure it remains internationally competitive since taking ownership in 2013, while growing and securing employment within the Northern Tasmanian region. We are well positioned for continued growth and look forward to further investments in 2020.”

Photo: Tasmanian Resources Minister Guy Barnett with Timberlink CEO Ian Tyson

Source: Timberlink
Bell Bay mill showcased

Two privately held Texas-based companies, Angelina Forest Products (AFP), Lufkin, Texas and McCoy’s Building Supply, San Marcos, Texas celebrate the initial production of southern yellow pine dimension lumber from AFP’s new Angelina County, Texas sawmill. First shipment of pine dimension lumber goes to McCoy’s Building Supply.

Angelina Forest Products state-of-the-art greenfield sawmill began construction in the fall of 2018.  The new facility with two shifts, will employ over 135 direct employee jobs and many more indirect jobs that will supply and support the operation.  The mill will produce southern yellow pine dimension lumber which includes 2×4 through 2×12 lengths 8’ to 20’.  Angelina Forest Products (AFP) will be one of the largest sawmills in the South.

Angelina Forest Product’s Lufkin sawmill has a design capacity of over 300 million board feet annually and will provide products for single and multi-family dwellings, outdoor living, repair & remodeling and industrial end-users.

McCoy’s is one of the nation’s largest privately held building supply retailers.

Wagner Meters has announced the addition of Jason Wright to the sales team as a Business Development Specialist for New Products. Wright brings more than 32 years of flooring experience specializing in Hardwood Flooring.

Starting in 1986 with a small sundry distributor in Medford, Oregon, Jason moved on to ascend through positions in Product Development, Support, and Marketing programs for several flooring companies to become the National Sales Manager for Tarkett Group, a global flooring solutions provider.

He brings a wealth of experience from starting new companies to supporting the flooring industry within the wholesale and retail sectors. Jason may be contacted by email at jwright@wagnermeters.com.

He will also be representing Wagner Meters at two upcoming 2020 Las Vegas exhibitions: The International Surfaces Event (TISE) at booth #4019 in January and World of Concrete (WOC) at booth #S12555 in February.

About Wagner Meters
In business since 1965, Wagner Meters provides field-proven moisture measurement technology to help flooring professionals improve their profits and reputations with tools to assist with eliminating wood and concrete moisture-related problems. Wagner’s line of trusted products includes versatile and accurate Orion® hand-held wood moisture meters as well as the Rapid RH® L6 concrete relative humidity testing system, which gives you official and actionable test results 48 hours faster than other test methods. For more information, click here.

Figures have been released by Te Uru Rakau (Forestry New Zealand) that show 228 grant applications were received for funding under the Government’s One Billion Trees Programme in 2019, a total of NZ$42.55 million being allocated across 42 projects.

Te Uru Rakau acting deputy director-general Sam Keenan said NZ$22.2 million of that had been approved across 10,758.4 hectares of new planting. “To date approximately 17,056,165 trees comprised of 9,785,067 native and 7,271,098 exotic trees have been funded.”

Mr Keenan said a key aspect of many of the billion trees project was “reliable science”, with NZ $499,321 of funding going to AUT’s Living Laboratories Project for research about integrating native canopy tree species such as rimu within agricultural landscapes. Another NZ $376,850 had gone to Manaaki Whenua — Landcare Research to build understanding about how New Zealanders perceive forestry.

Tane’s Tree Trust has received NZ $165,863 to devise ways of upscaling cost-effective planting and native forest reversion, while New Zealand Plant Producers Inc received NZ$100,000 to develop industry standards around the risk of spreading pests and pathogens through plant product systems.

A further NZ$39,500 was allocated to the New Zealand Nursery Practice Guidelines Project, which allows experienced nurserymen and scientists to share their expertise. One Billion Trees Programme grants and partnership funding of NZ$800,000 has also been allocated to the Waikato Regional Council to expand its riparian restoration project programme, which is working to improve the region’s water quality by integrating trees into farm settings.

The Tararua District Council received NZ$145,000 for its decision-support tool that gives landowners information about planting options on farms, and to strategically plan future forestry in the area. An additional NZ$95,000 went towards laying the foundations for Rotary’s 100 Forests of Peace and Remembrance Project.

Source: Te Uru Rakau

Establishing wood processors close to forestry allows wood processing and forestry residues to be used as an energy source, with any surplus able to be used by other nearby industries. Other primary processing (such dairy and meat processing) could also benefit from this strategy, and there is potential for a shared energy plant to service multiple factories.

This strategy of clustering industries around an energy source and utilising production waste streams is called industrial symbiosis. Applied in regional New Zealand it could create jobs, increase GDP and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Researchers have mapped New Zealand’s forestry, energy resources and fossil energy-using industries to identify regions where clusters of wood processing operations could be co-located with meat and dairy processing, for example. Gisborne, Hawkes Bay, Northland and Southland/Clutha are well suited to industrial symbiosis. Each is forecast to have a long-term supply of surplus logs, forestry and other woody waste to contribute.

If each of these clusters were established, the increase in onshore processing would provide an additional ~1000 jobs in each region, add a total of NZ$2 billion to New Zealand’s bottom line and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 67,000 tonnes a year by replacing fossil fuels with biomass.

Data produced by this project has now been supplied to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority for their continued analysis. New opportunities for wood processing clusters in these regions were identified using the WoodScape model and predictions of future log availability to calculate the best return on capital investment.

Gisborne, Hawkes Bay, Northland and Southland/Clutha regions have unique future wood processing options and the flow on opportunities to co-locate with other industries differ between regions.

Industrial symbiosis in Gisborne would be focused on standalone wood-processing powered by forestry and processing residues. In Ngāwha, Northland, the availability of geothermal energy frees up residues for secondary manufacturing. In Hawkes Bay and Southland, residues from wood processing clusters could be used to replace coal or gas used by other nearby industries.

Further opportunities for full industrial symbiosis have been identified around the Marsden Point oil refinery and Golden Bay Cement/Portland Cement in Northland. There is also potential to fuel industrial heat with biomass in the central North Island, Blenheim, Tasman/Nelson, Hokitika, Greymouth and Canterbury.

The new wood processes with the highest return on capital investment include sawmills, Optimised Engineering Lumber (OEL™), plywood, oriented strand board, cross-laminated timber and remanufactured timber. Where geothermal heat is available the range of options expands and includes bio-chemical recovery and manufacture of solid biofuels from wood processing residues that might otherwise have been used to provide process or drying heat.

China is increasing importation of logs from New Zealand and Europe, while diminishing imports from North America and Russia. As a region, Europe is now the second largest supplier of softwood logs to China behind New Zealand, reports the WRQ.

Europe has rapidly become a major supplier of softwood logs to China’s log market, while Russia and North America have lost market shares in 2019, reports the Wood Resource Quarterly. New Zealand continues to expand its market share in China, supplying 39% of the total import volume in the 3Q/19, up from 32% five years earlier. Russia and North America suffered the largest declines in the Chinese market share from 2015 to 2019, with Russia’s share falling from 28% to 12%, and North America from 21% to 13% during the same period.

In the 3Q/19, log imports from Russia were at their lowest levels in almost 20 years. The only other major change in the Chinese market over the past few years has been an increase in pine log shipments from Uruguay.

These have increased from just a few thousand cubic meters in 2016 to almost 2.5 million m3 last year, making Uruguay the fifth largest log supplier to China in 2018. Startlingly, shipments from Uruguay to China fell to less than 200,000 m3 in the 3Q/19, when prices for logs plummeted to the point where it no longer made financial sense for Uruguayan exporters to ship logs.

Interestingly, a number of countries in Europe, although some still small suppliers, have begun to expand their presence in the Chinese market over the past 12 months, reports the WRQ. This can be attributed to an oversupply of logs in their domestic markets. In the 3Q/19, the European supply of softwood logs totalled over two million m3.

Supplying countries included Germany, Czech, Poland and France (in descending order), all countries impacted by storms and insects in 2018 and 2019. The European share of imported softwood logs has increased from just three percent in the 3Q/18 to as much as 20% in the 3Q/19.

Source: Wood Resources International, www.WoodPrices.com

The WWF estimates we’re losing 27 football fields of forest every minute due to deforestation

• UK company Dendra plans to plant 500 billion trees by 2060 – using AI and drones.
• The drones can plant 120 seedpods per minute.
• The WWF estimates we’re losing 27 football fields of forest every minute due to deforestation.

A drone can plant two trees per second, according to UK tech company Dendra, which is aiming to “re-green” the planet. Dendra estimates it would take just 400 teams of two drone operators, with 10 drones per team, to plant 10 billion trees each year – and at a much lower cost than the traditional method of planting by hand. The target is to plant 500 billion trees by 2060, in often hard-to-reach places.

Susan Graham, CEO of Dendra Systems, says, “The challenge that we’re tackling is a complex one and working with a team of passionate engineers, plant scientists, drone operators, we came up with this idea to use automation and digital intelligence to plant billions of trees.”

So, how does it work? First, the replanting areas are identified using a combination of satellite images and drone-collected data. Specialized planting drones take to the skies loaded with seedpods containing a germinated seed and nutrients.

Once in position, the drones use pressurized air to fire the seeds into the ground – at 120 pods per minute. The seedpods penetrate the earth and start to grow once activated by water. Dendra estimates its technology – combining speed and accuracy – would enable governments to restore forests 150 times faster than planting by hand, and up to 10 times cheaper. Graham says it represents a new “step-change” in how we think about global ecosystem restoration.

“We need to use technology to scale up our restoration efforts, and the scale we’re talking about is tens of billions of trees every year. We’ll be able to see the ecosystems that we’ve restored from space. “There’s a saying that goes that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is today,” says Graham. “We have this opportunity now, and we need to act today.”

Source: weforum.org

Resource Management Service, LLC (RMS) has announced that it has successfully completed the sale of its Tasmanian hardwood plantations to investment funds advised by Global Forest Partners LP (GFP) of Lebanon, New Hampshire.

The transaction included total productive area of 21,000 hectares on 36,500 hectares of freehold land. The assets consist of two operating units spread across the northwest, northeast and southern regions of Tasmania, and were acquired by RMS from receivers in 2014 and 2015 with a strategy of generating near-term cash yields and long-term asset appreciation for the firm’s institutional investment clients.

Funds “Our decision to monetize these assets on behalf of our clients was driven by our assessment that market conditions were attractive for a sale. We expected the market would fully value the significant work RMS has undertaken to restructure and improve the portfolio of assets”, said Craig Blair, President and CEO of RMS.

The plantations are largely stocked with Eucalyptus nitens and are located in close proximity to processing plants and ports. The output from the plantations can be sold as hardwood logs for solid wood processing and as hardwood chips. The timber grown on the properties is sold into Asian export markets, which has a strong appetite for hardwood timber products. According to Blair, selling the two Australian estates together enhanced the overall value of the offering by providing a competitive level of scale in the Tasmanian hardwood industry.

“We are pleased to have taken these plantations through a value-enhancing investment cycle for our investors,” said Blair. “Australia is an attractive destination for sophisticated institutional investors, like our clients, because it offers excellent global diversification for their forest portfolios.

The country has a robust and growing forest industry and its primary timber cultivation regions, including Tasmania, provide outstanding access to high-growth global markets. For all of these reasons, we expect to be active participants in the region’s forest investment and ownership community in the years ahead.”

Source: RMS

The recent bushfires are a fresh blow to Victoria’s timber industry, coming just weeks after the state Labor government announced the end of all native forest logging within 10 years. Sawmills in the east of the state, which had already been struggling to secure enough logs to keep their machines running, said the government’s move would put thousands of workers out of their jobs and put the future of Victoria’s timber towns in doubt.

VicForests said it could not confirm numbers but that it had lost a significant amount of its logging coupes in the area, and would be unable to assess the damage while the fires were still burning. “The East Gippsland fires have had a significant impact on VicForests’ coupes,” a spokesman said. “While the fires are ongoing, we are unable to fully assess the impact. Our current focus is on fully supporting the efforts to manage the bushfires, deploying all available VicForests staff and contractors to the region.”

Construction Forestry Mining and Energy National Secretary Michael O’Connor said the destruction of East Gippsland forest in the blazes put the state government’s transition plan into doubt. “Clearly there’s been significant damage to the resources in East Gippsland and the union will be very concerned about the consequences for employment and the viability of some mills,” Mr O’Connor said. “There will certainly be concerns for the viability of the already flawed transitions plan.”

The industry’s national lobby group, the Australian Forest Products Association, said that some of the plantation trees currently burning, those used for building products, would take 30 years to regrow. “So, when the fires are finally contained, it will be like a slow-motion train crash as the full downstream consequences are felt,” the association’s chief executive Ross Hampton said.

“Large areas of our plantation forest estate in key forestry regions in NSW, Victoria and South Australia are on fire and the downstream consequences for rural communities will be severe.”

A spokesman for Victorian Agriculture Minister Jaclyn Symes said the government was aware of significant loss of logging coupes in East Gippsland but that its immediate focus was on “extinguishing the fires and protecting life”. The Victorian timber industry group VAFI said the full extent of the damage could not yet be assessed.

Pierre Lafond, head of Carbotech project management, has announced the nomination of Jon Comber to the position of Project Manager. This announcement supports the growth management plan that was put in place slightly more than a year ago.

Jon Comber will have the main task of taking charge of client projects, from equipment design to installation to implementation on production lines. He will oversee various markets including Canada, the United States and abroad.

With an undergraduate degree in engineering, Jon also has pertinent management experience in manufacturing production and various projects within the forestry industry. He has also supervised infrastructure development and production expansion for a sawmill operation in the northeastern United States over the past few years. His leadership, critical analysis and results orientation, including expertise in sawmill equipment, have convinced us that Jon is the right person to support Carbotech and their clients in numerous projects.

The entire Carbotech management team welcomes Jon Comber and wishes him great success!

About Carbotech 
For the past 30 years, Carbotech has been working in collaboration with sawmill and planing operations to install cutting-edge equipment allowing for efficient production operations and wood plank handling. Continually striving for new designs and patents, Carbotech is a partner of choice on the market thanks to solutions adapted to the needs of each client with engineering, project management, installation and after sales service with CarboCare. The company boasts over 100 employees in whom they have great confidence. Carbotech has various business partners, parts and service distribution centres as well as mechanical response units in order to cover markets around the world.