Wood Supply Changes in the Southeastern United States and 

Effects on Pine Pulping, Bleaching and Papermaking

Pronouncements by academic and think tank pundits that the southeastern United States has sufficient wood resources will ring hollow for certain mills and their wood procurement teams. Several almost irreversible trends are and will profoundly affect wood supply over the next 5-20 years. These include, but are not limited to, urbanization, reduction in woodland size, tree planting at less than half of pine planting in the 1960's to mid-1990's, few or no plantations of hardwoods, housing starts impact on residual sawmill chip supply, competing wood utilization from pellet mills, reduction in logging crews and a massive decline in research efforts for productive pine plantation forests.  High quality sawmill chips have and will continue to decrease in availability resulting in a procurement push to secure younger pine from plantation thinning's and the tops of tree stems harvested for sawn lumber. Differences in pine wood of different ages for pulp production have been well documented. Younger pine can have 2-4% less pulp yield, 10-25 % higher lignin content resulting in higher pulping costs due to higher chemical consumption and lower yields, 10-20% lower wood density, a reduction of 30-50% in fiber length and up to a 40-50% reduction in tear index. paper strength. As wood supply trends more to juvenile pine due to reductions in sawmill chip availability, mill management, investors and wood procurement teams are advised to increase due diligence on their perceived wood basket.