Word: lumbers
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...Million in Chips. The forest industries have been forced to branch into new products as per-capita lumber consumption has dropped (down to 256 bd. ft. in 1955 from 504 in 1904) and timberland prices soared (up as much as 1,700% in 18 years). Many companies have also diversified to make full use of their tim ber reserves, e.g., western alder, long bypassed when redwood and Douglas fir forests were logged solely for lumber, is now widely cut for wood pulp...
...same time, the small, one-product companies that once ruled the woods are yielding to corporate Paul Bunyans. To make the most of every shaving and splinter, lumber companies are branching into paper and pulp production; paper companies are pushing into lumber manufacture. Georgia-Pacific Corp., No. 2 plywood producer (after U.S. Plywood), recently broke ground for a $20 million pulp and paper mill at Toledo, Ore. Georgia-Pacific President Owen Cheatham, who has increased the company's timber reserves and cutting rights 1,000% since 1953, explained: "We aim to parlay the $900,000 worth of wood chips...
Many companies are merging to assure long-term lumber supplies. Georgia-Pacific last week took an option on a "substantial majority" of stock (at $310 a share) in California's Hammond Lumber Co., thus gained control of 3.5 billion bd. ft. of timber. Biggest merger yet is now being negotiated by International Paper Co., biggest U.S. papermaker, and Kansas City's Long-Bell Lumber Co., No. 2 lumber producer (after Weyerhaeuser...
...brightest hope for the future, as one lumberman said recently, is in "man's resourcefulness grafted on nature's resources." Sawdust and shavings today are swept thriftily into plastics, glues and hardboards. From the bark come "cork" tile, insecticides and floor wax. Odd-sized chunks of lumber are laminated into beams with the strength (and half the weight) of steel. Stumps and scraps, burned-over and diseased timber are transmuted into hardboard and rayon, edible sugars and drinkable alcohol. Even the waste chemicals that poison the air around paper mills from Maine to Minnesota are now being transformed...
...other worrisome inflationary pressures. The overall wholesale price index shows a 1.8% rise since January, while the cost-of-living index rose .2% in April for the second monthly increase in a row, thus bringing wage increases to 1,000,000 workers with escalator contracts. Key products like lumber, structural materials and metals have all edged...