By Sheilla Jones
Sawmills and pulp operations in Canada are scrambling to get enough wood to meet their needs. The wood is there, but the capacity to get it harvested and to the mills is not.
“Everybody is short of wood these days,” said Dale Munro, woodlands manager for Prendiville Industries in Kenora. “There’s not enough trucking capacity.”
Many sawmills and forestry operations closed their doors and sold off their equipment after the economic recession in 2008 that saw a massive collapse in the demand for construction materials from the United States. So did small-scale foresters and trucking companies. The massive contraction in the industry’s capacity to get wood from the forest to the market is now squeezing mill operations.
Munro said Weyerhaeuser’s new plant in Kenora, which produces an engineered wood product manufactured primarily from poplar, has had to shut down several times this year because they have run out of wood.
“We’re all tight for wood. The capacity has to build back up to meet the demand.”
Rebuilding that capacity is crucial to plans by Prendiville to re-open its own plant in Kenora in the spring. The Kenora Forest Products sawmill shut down six years ago, another victim of the economic recession, and now the company is looking for a stable wood supply of pine and spruce.
“We’re planning on running 450-thousand cubic metres through the sawmill when we’re running full tilt,” said Munro. He added that he’ll be looking for large quantities of wood from Manitoba.
Prices for softwood lumber, plywood, oriented strand board and pulp have been climbing steadily over the past year, and Munro predicts they’ll soon be back up to historical levels.
“Things are gradually returning to normal,” he said. “Demand is up and it will continue to go up.”
The sawmill in Ear Falls, about 200 kilometres north of Kenora, has also re-opened. Eacom Timber Corporation re-opened the mill in August, after shutting down operations there five years ago.
