Free Republic

New mill to turn dead trees into pellet fuel. Colorado's first wood-pellet mill owes its birth to pine beetles that are killing millions of trees near the town of Kremmling and across northwest Colorado. The diseased trees will be the new Kremmling mill's chief input - a new twist for the pellet-fuel industry. The 18,000-square-foot plant is billed as the largest west of the Mississippi. It's slated in February to start grinding trees into environmentally friendly pellets for wood-pellet stoves and industrial and commercial pellet boilers. Many of the trees are too skinny or too cracked and old to be...

Pine beetle kill trees have new purpose. Playing with Lincoln Logs as a child meant getting to be an architect constructing dream homes. Now, in Summit County, that toy is the inspiration for making those homes a reality while putting the lodgepole pine beetle kill trees to use. Using a log lathe machine, the bark is removed (which kills the pine beetle), smoothed and a notch is put in it similar to they way Lincoln Logs look so the logs will seamlessly fit together. And as this business has come together, it has gained state attention. Recently, a representative from...

When the U.S. Forest Service received no bids on two small timber sales in Eagle County earlier this year, the agency's local rangers encountered what is becoming a problem throughout the intermountain West. The federal agency got a lesson in market economics and the three-way tug of war over lumber in national forests. There were no bidders for the timber "salvage" sales designed to remove trees killed by infesting pine beetles. The Forest Service also wants to sell the dead trees so they won't add extra fuel to wildfires. The glut of dead trees is occurring at a time when...

Logging trucks are again rumbling through town after a nearly 15-year hiatus. The Forest Service has reopened - or has plans to reopen - numerous drainages south of Eagle Ranch to logging... There are currently two active sales south of Eagle, with another in the works, said Cary Green, the White River National Forest's timber management assistant for the Eagle area. The 60-acre Beecher Gulch salvage timber sale, on Hardscrabble Mountain, sold in 2005, and about 500,000 board feet of timber is currently being harvested... A typical 2,000-square foot, single-family home requires about 27,000 board feet of framing lumber, paneling...

Plywood mill closing after 30 years The Associated Press4/30/02 7:37 PM GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) -- After 30 years weathering the ups and downs of the timber industry, Fourply Inc. stopped production at its plywood mill here on Tuesday, putting about 50 people out of work. For Tom Alarie, the closure left him with an uncertain future after 31 years working in plywood mills as a receiving clerk, grader, panel patcher and tongue-and-groove machine operator. "I may go to school, but I'd rather go back into plywood," he said. "It's the only thing you can make any money at." Declining...