Dakota,
The big picture here is that BC still is a huge player in lumber...the coastal D.Fir milling is still happening but it isn't as popular with builders as the "whitewoods", that is, the Spruce-Pine-alpine Fir, or "SPF" lumber. And the volumes cut are quite a bit smaller than the wood coming from the interior of BC.
The name of the game in BC is still "sustainable" forestry and the big guys still continue to suck up the small guys, to get their cutting rights. You might have heard that BC has gone through a heck of an infestation of bugs called the "pine bark beetle" that killed hundreds of thousands of acres of prime forest land. That has caused some upheaval because cutting rights evaporated as the trees became worthless. Not overnight, mind you, they can be still cut when they are dead but as the log ages the lumber sawn from it has more and more defect that if sawn from fresh green logs. So cutting rights are being rearranged, and there has been some upheaval as the less efficient mills get toasted. Forest replanting has ramped up as well.
I believe the mill I am working at was a casualty of two big companies swapping cutting rights to get all the rights surrounding their mills so they could operate more efficiently. So it wasn't totally a thing where this mill fell behind in new technology, as the stuff I'm taking out is FAST equipment.
With huge amounts of wood to cut at one mill, the ability to invest in state of the art sawing machinery becomes easier. A modern BC sawmill will hit $200 million easy. That sorter alone in my above post will shake out at 2 million if bought new, not counting the other machines and conveyors around it.
One of the latest things is robotic lumber packaging...as the units of lumber come out of the planermill, the last thing that needs to be done is to put lumber wrap "paper" (actually kind of woven plastic) over the load and put things like size, grade, etc info on the package. Some of the mills put out so much lumber that a package of lumber comes out every 45 seconds or so (on two lines) and has to be wrapped. It took 8 guys on 2 lines to do this over two shifts. The robotic packager does a nicer job, with just one guy tending two packagers on each shift. The packagers are a million bucks each. Its all about lowering your cost of production, since a sawmill laborer job starts at about $25/hr.
By "package" here I mean the lumber you see at your local building supply store--in 2x4 size, it usually is 13 pieces wide x 22 pieces high-- 286 2x4's per package.
Jon.
Bookmarks