Corporations: Test-Tube Forests

No businessmen wait longer for their product to develop than the timber owners of the Pacific Northwest. It takes Douglas firs 80 years to mature, and some still waiting to be cut were young when Paul Revere made his midnight ride. Timber's unique "lead time" is a constant concern of the 63-year-old Weyerhaeuser Co., which turns out more lumber and wood products than any other company in the $6 billion industry that provides raw material for U.S. homes, newsprint, boats, containers and furniture.

Weyerhaeuser's 3.6 billion velvety green acres of timber, most of them in Washington and Oregon, make up the largest private preserve in the U.S., but company foresters estimate that the last virgin tree will fall in the year 2020. As far off as that may seem, it is too close for the "Big W." Weyerhaeuser is now developing a revolutionary supertree that will be impervious to disease, perfectly shaped and full-grown in only 40 years. "We control the size of peas and the tenderness of corn," says a Weyerhaeuser scientist. "Why not a test-tube forest?"

Useful Bark. Weyerhaeuser's evergreen empire began in 1900 when Immigrant Lumberman Frederick Weyerhaeuser bought 900,000 acres of forest from his St. Paul neighbor. Northern Pacific Railroad Builder James J. Hill; he paid $5,400,000 for property today valued at $1,750,000,000. In the early days, lumber mills customarily burned off waste or dumped it in nearby rivers, polluting them. Weyerhaeuser, spurred by the New Deal's emphasis on conservation, looked for ways to use waste. Over the years, it found a process to bleach fir pulp white to make it suitable for better-grade papermaking, developed paperboard that will take color printing and a polyethylene coating to replace wax on milk cartons. Aside from its supertrees, Weyerhaeuser's most intensive research is aimed at finding more uses for bark, which represents 15% of each tree. It has developed a hydraulic debarker that bombards mill logs with water and leaves them peeled like bananas. Recovered bark chips, once burned for fuel, are now processed as medicine, vanillin, insulation, soil conditioners, reinforcement for polyester plastics, and mud thinner for oil-well drilling. Says Vice President for Wood Products George H. Weyerhaeuser, "You'd almost think that lumber is the byproduct now." Lumber is almost that. Ten years ago lumber and pulp represented 80% of Weyerhaeuser's output. Today they represent 41%—and the remainder is in plywood, veneers, paperboard, containers and paper. But the changeover was unnerving. Once it had learned to bleach fir pulp, Weyerhaeuser quintupled production and set out to become the dominant U.S. pulp supplier. But rival pulpmakers bought up paper companies, which then used only their pulp; to compete, Weyerhaeuser was forced to buy up its own paper and plywood mills. It struggled through organizational shakedowns and an initiation into the unfamiliar areas of new products and consumer sales.