More Than the Squeal

The meat-packing industry brags that it uses all of a pig but the squeal. The lumber industry is different. It is so wasteful that a conservationist once growled: "They use the squeal and throw away the pig." No more than a third of a felled tree becomes lumber. The rest is left in the forest or is wasted at the sawmills.

One of those who has worried over this waste is the Weyerhaeuser (pronounced "Warehouser") Timber Co., which owns 5% (about two million acres) of the timberland in Oregon and Washington. The world's biggest lumber firm, it devised a simple way to use sawdust, by pressing it into fireplace logs (Prestologs) at its Longview (Wash.) plant.

This week Weyerhaeuser proudly announced that it has developed products to use tree bark, thus utilize the 12% of a Douglas fir log that was formerly thrown away or burned as sawmill boiler fuel.

New Products. Weyerhaeuser is turning out five bark products under the name, Silvacon. They can be used as a soil mulch, in the manufacture of phenolic resin and fiber paints, and as a plywood adhesive.

A new $1,000,000 plant will soon be opened at Longview. Then bark processing and plywood making will be on an assembly-line basis. Mechanical peelers will strip the logs, send the bark to the processing section, the logs to the saws; they will meet again as Silvacon glue and plywood.

New President. The modern forester behind all this is John Philip Weyerhaeuser Jr., 48, greying grandson of the company's founder. Last week Phil Weyerhaeuser was elected president of Weyerhaeuser Timber Co., top company of the sprawling family interests which include sawmills, pulp mills and ocean-going steamers (President H. H. Irvine died last winter). A Yale graduate and a member of the Yale battery during World War I, he went to work for the company in 1920, concentrated on conservation measures. He started the firm on selective cutting of trees, later got it to branch out into research to meet the competition from light metals and plastics.

Publicity-shy and restrained since the kidnaping of his son George in 1935 (TIME, June 3, 1935 et seq.), Phil opens up only in the privacy of his Tacoma home, where he enjoys martinis and practical jokes. In the basement he has a complete woodworking shop where he makes and repairs furniture. Not all his carpentering is successful. One winter Phil built a 15-foot sailboat with his two sons, George and John Philip III (Flip), now students of forestry at Yale. (There are also two daughters.) When launched, the boat promptly sank; it was badly caulked.

Last year, with Phil as executive vice president, the company's gross sales from forest products were $66,271,996, its net income $12,995,478. This year, earnings are "slightly ahead" of last year. Eventually, Phil expects that his new bark byproducts will add $10,000,000 a year to his gross business.

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