Wood-Chip Industry in Tohoku

Abstract

1) The development of wook-chip industry in Japan was originated in the shortage of timber for wood-pulp industry. Today wood-chips exceed all the other materials put together as raw material of pulp industry in this country. Therefore it is natural that the development of wood-chip industry is conditioned mostly by pulp industry and partially by fiber board industry which is closely connected with the former.2) The wood-chip factories are generally small in scale, and most of them are operated as a subsidiary business of saw-mills or furniture industries. But in Tohoku and Hokkaido the scale of the chip industry is larger than in other districts. There the materials of wood-chips are supplied not only from saw-mills, but also directly from forest areas, especially in the cases of specialized wood-chip industry.3) Wood-chip factories are distributed in the vicinity of saw-mills or forests. Moreover, they are located near pulp factories. Wood-chips are transported by trucks specially converted for that purpose.4) So, most of the wood-ship factories are controlled by the management of large pulp or fiber-board companies.5) The supply of chip material from each saw-mill is small in quantity. So the shortage of chips must be supplied with chips from the forests originally for firewood or charcoal.6) Demand of wood forwood-chips affects forestry, but the supply of materials for wood-chip industry is unsteady because of the incompleteness of forest roads.