Joseph Hardy of 84 Lumber fame, a 2-by-4 among toothpicks, dies on his 100th birthday. In other Company news: Paper Excellence commits to Resolute transaction; Boise Cascade to lay off Elgin Plywood workers; Vaagen Fibre is closing in Midway, BC; and Red Rock Biofuels faces foreclosure in Oregon. Meanwhile: Canada seeks railway data for supply chain transparency; Forests2Market’s six predictions for 2023; the Michigan Timberman have a new Executive Director; and Auburn University’s former forestry dean retires.
In other news: USFS logging plans proceed in Hoosier National Forest; the US debate over what counts as ‘renewable‘ for energy; Oregon’s practical attitude to timber harvests; the cost of policing BC’s logging standoffs; and the ingenuity of Roman era concrete is revealed.
Finally, lumberjacks, the most meaningful, least stressful job in America. Seriously!
Kelly McCloskey, Tree Frog Editor
OTTAWA
Paper Excellence Group is poised to expand in Canada’s forestry industry by diversifying into the lumber sector. Richmond, B.C.-based Paper Excellence has focused in the past on pulp and paper, but the real prize is Montreal-based Resolute’s lumber assets. …Canada’s Competition Bureau said last week that it approved the proposed acquisition of Resolute, subject to conditions, specifically that Paper Excellence’s wholly owned Domtar Corp. division sell its pulp mill in Dryden, Ont., and divest Resolute’s pulp and paper mill in Thunder Bay. Paper Excellence said this week that it is fully committed to its US$1.6-billion bid for Resolute, undaunted by slumping lumber markets and undeterred by lingering concerns from environmentalists over corporate concentration. …But with the transaction is subject to approval from the U.S. Department of Justice. …“The transaction remains on course to close in the first half of 2023,” Paper Excellence said. [to access the full story a Globe & Mail subscription is required]
Envy the lumberjacks, for they perform the happiest, most meaningful work on earth. Or at least they think they do. Agriculture, logging and forestry have the highest levels of self-reported happiness — and lowest levels of self-reported stress — of any major industry category, according to our analysis of thousands of time journals from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey. (Additional reporting sharpened our focus on lumberjacks and foresters, but almost everyone who works on farms or in forests stands out.) The time-use survey typically asks people to record what they were doing at any given time during the day. But in four recent surveys, between 2010 and 2021, they also asked a subset of those people how meaningful those activities were, or how happy, sad, stressed, pained and tired they felt on a six-point scale. …While our friends the lumberjacks and farmers do the least-stressful work, their jobs are well-known to be particularly perilous, and they report the highest levels of pain on the job. To puzzle out why, we zoomed out to look at activity categories beyond work.
This week, we highlight recent announcements regarding changes in capacity across the paper and forest products space:
ONTARIO — A new alliance of industry, scientific, non-profit and government partners is collaborating to increase the success of urban tree planting, as high mortality rates remain a challenge for the perennial plant that is key to tackling climate change. The goal of Greening the Landscape Research Consortium is to help seedlings survive to become giants, and its advantage is information-sharing along the “urban tree value chain” – from nursery staff tending seeds, to planting contractors, to municipal foresters nurturing the trees. The consortium was launched in Ontario’s Niagara region in 2021 by Vineland Research and Innovation Centre, or VRIC, a not-for-profit institution focused on improving the sustainability and competitiveness of Canadian horticulture. While millions of urban trees are planted every year, sustaining them is difficult. The City of Toronto alone plants 120,000, and Montreal hopes to reach half a million annually by 2030.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new standards for how much of the nation’s fuel supply should come from renewable sources. The proposal calls for an increase in the mandatory requirements set forth by the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS. The program, created in 2005, dictates how much renewable fuels — products like corn-based ethanol, manure-based biogas, and wood pellets — are used to reduce the use of petroleum-based transportation fuel, heating oil, or jet fuel and cut greenhouse gas emissions. The new requirements have sparked a heated debate between industry leaders, who say the recent proposal will help stabilize the market, and green groups, which argue that the favored fuels come at steep environmental costs. …Alternative fuels, like biogas and biomass, have gained steam thanks to the ethanol boom of the renewable fuel category. The biogas industry is set to boom thanks to tax incentives created by the Inflation Reduction Act.