…... Lumber Shortage continued Last spring, for example, a digester that processes wood pulp at a paper mill in Jay, Maine, exploded— robbing both Samuel Andrews and Robbins Lumber of a buyer for chips, branches, knotty wood, and the narrow, tapering tops of the tree trunks. The mill’s Pennsylvania-based owners have decided not to replace it, and laid off more than 150 workers. This symbiosis is important to the sawmills. Eric Kingsley, an industry analyst in Portland, Maine, recently helped a large company study the possibility of putting a sawmill in Maine. “The big constraint wasn’t workforce, it certainly wasn’t log supply, it was ‘What do we do with all these chips?’ Because if another paper mill closes, are we going to be able to move these in 20 years?” Robbins Lumber has a solution, but it wasn’t cheap. Two years ago, the family committed $30 million to an on-site biomass power plant that uses the mill’s waste chips to generate power for thousands of local homes—and enough heat to dry its own white pine boards in a massive kiln building before they are shipped to market. The expense of that project is part of the answer to the question: Why not build another sawmill? Robbins in front of the piles of chips left over from the mill. Many will wind up inside the company’s on-site power plant. The other lies inside the mill. Step inside and see the bewildering array of technology that’s required to turn a log into lumber. A metal detector, for one thing: Maine’s eastern white pines may be a century old by the time they are felled to make boards, so a tree might contain hooks, nails, or bullets that can gum up the works. More expensive are the computer scanners that make instantaneous decisions about how to slice a plank into marketable boards for maximum value, based on the location of cracks, knots, and other imperfections; the calculations and the cut are made in a fraction of a second. There are 30-pound saws that shape the planks Here and there, as we duck, twist, and climb our way down the production line, the ruddy-faced Robbins snatches a board from a conveyor like a grizzly bear pawing a salmon from a stream, to show me up close the work of all his machines. It’s this technology that marks the real impediment to a quick expansion to meet lumberyards’ big offers. A new sawmill could take years to be completed—and the last lumber price spike, in 2018, came and went in half that time. I was lucky to visit when I did: Next week the plant will shut for maintenance. Yes, in the middle of an all-time spike in lumber prices. “You need good times to reinvest to keep yourself competitive,” Alden Robbins says. New blades, new belts, new gears. That’s what a good year of sales makes possible. But a new sawmill? For an industry that’s been in the dumps for 10 years, that will take more than a run on Home Depot. Page 15
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