During his visit to the Montreal Wood Convention, Québec’s Minister of Forests, Wildlife and Parks, Laurent Lessard, announced that a Wood Innovation Forum will be held in Rivière-du-Loup on October 31, 2016. He invited all the forest products industry’s actors to attend this unique event. “The year 2016 is a transitional year for the forest industry”,…
Poland has approved large-scale logging in Europe’s last primeval woodland in a bid to combat a beetle infestation despite protests from scientists, ecologists and the European Union. The action in the Białowieża forest is intended to fight the spread of the spruce bark beetle. “We’re acting to curb the degradation of important habitats, to curb…
The flooring plant and sawmill at Kennebec Lumber Co. are bustling with activity on a weekday morning, as logs get measured and sliced into lumber and the boards are graded, stacked and prepared for shipping. Meanwhile, just up the road, construction is nearing completion on a new biobrick manufacturing facility that will turn sawdust from…
The mountain pine beetle continues to attack pine trees at an exponential rate in Jasper National Park and has the potential to overrun the park’s forests within the next few years. According to Parks Canada, just over 21,500 hectares of the park’s pine forests have now been colonized by the beetle, more than three times…
The United Steelworkers Local 1-85 has launched legal proceedings against Western Forest Products to fight for Franklin Division loggers who haven’t worked at all in 2016. However, WFP claims the problem stems from a rate dispute with a contractor, and that they have been working to get employees back to work in their mills. The…
From looking after a multi-million-dollar machine to helping his fellow human beings, John Mondoux is one of the hundreds of former Domtar workers who has reinvented his occupation since the mill closed. “It’s definitely a major change, from dealing with my job to make paper, to taking care of people — a big difference, absolutely,”…
A worker at the Harmac Pacific pulp mill near Nanaimo has died after the wood chip pile he was standing on collapsed. Chris Fletcher, 37, of Nanaimo, had worked at the mill for four years and was a popular employee-owner, said company president Levi Sampson. “We’ve got extremely heavy hearts right now at Harmac.” The…
When seeking clues to how well conservation efforts are working in the present, sometimes scientists look to the past — and there may be no better historical record than the forest surveys conducted in Missouri by the Bureau of Land Management in the 1800s. Using these historical records, University of Missouri researchers were able to…
Nearly four months after the sawmill in Hornepayne, Ont., shut down, there are still more questions than answers — and the community is now feeling the pinch of fewer paycheques. Hornepayne, about 500 km northeast of Thunder Bay, is home to about 1,000 people. When the sawmill closed unexpectedly late last year, CN became the major employer in the town. Now, the railroad is…
Public comments are being accepted on a discussion paper released this week as part of a review of the annual allowable cut for the Prince George timber supply area. The paper provides the results of an analysis that includes a base-case forecast calling for an initial harvest of 10.1 million cubic metres for 10 years,…