Category Archives: Wood Products

Soft Veneer and Plywood

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Today’s market size is the value of soft veneer and plywood consumed in the United States in 2007 and 2011. This figure is referred to as apparent consumption as it is the result of the following calculation: the value of U.S. made product shipments, less exports, plus imports. In the case of soft veneer and plywood, as in the case of all construction materials, the years since 2007 have been very difficult as the industry works through the collapse of the housing market and… builds back very slowly. Production fell over this period by 23% while exports grew by the same percentage and imports dropped by 42%.

Geographic reference: United States
Year: 2007 and 2011
Market size: $4.28 billion and $3.09 billion respectively
Sources: (1) “Value of Exports, General Imports, and Imports by Country and by 6-digit NAICS,” U.S. International Trade Statistics, a data set kept by the U.S. Census Bureau and made available online here. (2) “Manufacturing: Subject Series: Industry-Product Analysis: Industry Shipments by Products, 2007,” 2007 Economic Census, data on NAICS 321212, available online with all the Economic Census reports from the Census Bureau’s American FactFinder web site here. (3) “Value of Product Shipments: Value of Products for Product Classes, 2010 and 2011,” Annual Survey of Manufactures, available online through the American FactFinder site but more specifically, here
Original source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census
Posted on February 11, 2014

Garden Mulch from Cypress

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After a summer break, we’re ready to start posting market size entries again.

Garden mulch comes in many forms: leaves, grass clippings, pine needles, wood chips, and tree bark, just to name a few. One popular type of mulch, cypress mulch, is made from harvested trees in the Southern United States. At one time, cypress trees, wildlife-friendly and one of the most hurricane-resistant trees, were plentiful on the Gulf Coast. Many were thousands of years old. After Congress passed the Swampland Act in 1850, deeding millions of acres of wetlands to the states, many of those acres were sold to corporations for 75 cents an acre or less. By 1930, most of the virgin cypress were logged. In the past, cypress was logged for home building and flooring, but more recently, thousands of acres of cypress are being cut down to create garden mulch. Data are on an annual basis.

Geographic reference: United States
Year: 2012
Market Size: $750 million
Source: Selcraig, Bruce, “The Swamp Man,” Sierra, May/June 2012, pages 34-39
Posted on July 31, 2012

Woody Biomass

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As fuel prices rise, demand for alternative energy sources naturally grows. One such alternative energy for those burning fossil fuels in an industrial application is to burn woody biomass instead. Not surprisingly, pulp and paper manufacturers—many of whom are vertically integrated and thus own their primary input material, wood—around the world are using more woody biomass to fuel their own industrial applications.

Today’s market size is the volume of woody biomass—bark, sawdust, wood chips, forest residues and the like—used by the pulp and paper industry globally in 2009.

Geographic reference: World
Year: 2009
Market size: 1,400 trillion British Thermal Units which is roughly equal to 75 million oven dried metric tons.
Source: “Biomass Market Update – 4Q/2009,” Wood Resource Quarterly – 4Q/2009, page 10, available online here.
Original source: Wood Resources International
Posted on October 3, 2011