Industry Watch

Full Slate of Supplier Trade Shows Scheduled
The Wood Technology Clinic and Show, the first of three major industry trade shows this year, will be held March 19-21 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. The Clinic and Show is produced by the Atlanta-based Building Group of VNU Expositions.

EXPO 2003, the Forest Products Machinery & Equipment Exposition sponsored every two years by the Southern Forest Products Association, is scheduled for June 25-27 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.

And Wood Summit, a new show developed by Paperloop, the San-Francisco-based forest products industry information clearinghouse, will be held October 1-3 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon.

The Engineered Wood Research Foundation (EWRF), meanwhile, will once again sponsor its annual Info Fair in conjunction with APA’s annual meeting in San Diego, California September 13-16. EWRF is a related nonprofit organization of APA.

Panel, I-joist, LVL Production Up in 2002
U.S. and Canadian production of structural wood panels totaled a record-setting 40.34 billion square feet (3/8-inch) basis in 2002, up 3.5 percent from 2001, according to APA's year-end production tally. The old record of 40.3 billion feet was set in 2000.

Oriented strand board production increased 1.17 billion feet to 22.7 billion. Plywood production also rose by 230 million feet to 17.6.

Among other engineered wood products, I-joist production rose six percent to 981 million linear feet and laminated veneer lumber output increased five percent to 62 million cubic feet. Glulam production fell six percent to 338 million board feet, reflecting the weak nonresidential construction market.  

BC Associations Merge, CPA and Hardboard Groups Consolidate
Three British Columbia Interior forest products associations merged recently with the Council of Forest Industries of British Columbia (COFI), the result of several months of consolidation talks.

Merging with COFI were the Northern Forest Products Association, the Cariboo Lumber Manufacturers Association and the Interior Lumber Manufacturers Association. A fifth association, the Coast Forest & Lumber Association, chose to maintain its separate existence. Founded in 1960, COFI represents approximately 100 BC forest products industry companies and six trade associations.

The Composite Panel Association (CPA) and American Hardboard Association (AHA) also recently announced a consolidation of the two organizations. CPA represents manufacturers of particleboard, MDF and now hardboard products used for exterior siding, interior wall paneling, and furniture and industrial applications. AHA had represented six hardboard producers accounting for more than 90 percent of U.S. and Canadian hardboard production capacity, as well as several suppliers.

Northwest Logging A Moot Issue–Forest Service Report
Federal forest timber harvests in the Northwest are now so limited that the debate over logging in the region is a moot issue, a U.S. Forest Service report due out soon contends, according to a recent article in The (Portland) Oregonian.

"For all the debate surrounding moves by the Bush administration to accelerate logging on public lands in the Northwest, the figures show it’s a matter of fighting over scraps," the article noted. Federal land in Oregon, for example, which accounted for nearly 60 percent of the state’s timber in 1988, today supplies less than five percent of harvests.

National forests comprise one-third of the country’s timberland, but will yield less than four percent of the nation’s wood by 2010. The rest will come increasingly from private timberlands in the South, and from foreign countries, including Canada, New Zealand, Chile and Russia, the report states.

Called the Resources Planning Act Assessment, the report is produced for Congress every 10 years.

Mold Concerns Overstated, Health Experts Conclude
Widespread concern over the health risks associated with exposure to mold are unsupported by medical evidence, the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine reported recently.

The organization, the nation’s largest medical society with some 6,000 member physicians, said only five percent of the population is likely to have an allergic reaction to mold, and that outdoor mold poses a greater risk than indoor mold.

A separate review of the medical literature found much the same story. Black mold (Stachybotrys chartarum) only causes problems for the small percentage of people who are allergic to it, not the vast majority of the population, according to a report by the Texas Medical Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs.

Mold-related health concerns, fueled by sensationalist media reports, have spawned new legislation, thousands of lawsuits, and a dramatic rise in insurance claims. One major insurer reported 11,000 claims in 2001, up from just 11 in 1999.

APA, meanwhile, is in the second year of a mold mitigation awareness campaign as part of its Build A Better Home (BBH) program. The campaign is designed to direct builders to APA information on how to prevent building envelope moisture intrusion, a prerequisite of mold formation in buildings.

Forestry College Woes Underscore Wider Wood Education Problem
Undergraduate enrollment at the University of Washington’s College of Forest Resources has declined from 800 in the early 1970s to just 250 today, according to a recent Seattle Times article on the college’s enrollment, budget and mission woes.

Although concerned only with the UW forestry program, the story touches on a larger issue of declining forestry school enrollments nationally, a reflection in part of the low regard the general public now has for forestry and wood science.

The problem also extends to wood curricula in civil engineering departments, notes Rakesh Gupta, associate professor in the Department of Wood Science and Engineering at Oregon State University and chairman of a wood education committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers Structural Engineering Institute (ASCE/SEI). "Only half of civil engineering programs offer a course in wood design as an elective, and this is the main reason for the lack of familiarity with wood as compared to steel and concrete among design professionals," Gupta says. 

RAN Still Not Satisfied with Home Depot Wood Procurement Policies
Home Depot, the nation’s largest home improvement store chain, issued a report recently detailing the progress the company has made in procuring wood products from sustainably managed sources.

But that progress still isn’t good enough, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) contends. And the preservationist organization has threatened to renew protests at Home Depot stores unless the retailer goes further in meeting RAN’s demands.

Home Depot announced in 1999 that by this year it would stop selling certain types of lauan, redwood and cedar products from endangered areas. But RAN spokesman Michael Brune said the giant retailer still stocks Indonesian lauan, and a RAN press statement complained that Home Depot "has yet to take the final and most important step in its commitment–to use its power as the market leader to drive change within the forest products industry."

Home Depot sells approximately $5 billion of wood products annually, accounting for about nine percent of its sales.