CANADA: Newsprint from Waste Wood

A crowd of 500 Canadian business, industrial and political leaders gathered one day last week at a new clearing on the wooded east coast of Vancouver Island. They had come to attend the opening of the $22 million Elk Falls paper mill, first newsprint mill built in Canada in 14 years.

Inside the big, greenish concrete plant, the visitors saw a sight unique in Canadian papermaking. The wood supply clanking up the jackladder to be milled into paper was not the customary heavy, costly pine, fir and spruce; it was scraps of branches and tree tops and scrubby hemlock, waste wood that loggers call “slash” or “hog.” Pounded by the mill’s crushing stones, the scrap was being processed into newsprint as marketable as any produced from the most expensive pulpwood.

The Elk Falls mill is largely the achievement of Robert Filberg, vice president of the Canadian Western Lumber Co. Throughout his 45 years in the British Columbia timber trade, Filberg always was bothered by the disheartening waste involved in harvesting pulpwood. In 1940, he decided to do something about it. Working with the province’s forestry department, he experimented with new methods of logging waste wood and new-type machines to mill it. When the process was perfected, Filberg’s company closed a deal with the U.S.-owned Crown Zellerbach Corp. to build the Elk Falls mill. Its success is already assured. The company has a ten-year contract to sell the bulk of its 100,000-ton annual production in the U.S.