Weyerhauser's Scienfific Advances Draw National Attenfion

Our thnnks to TIME, The Week'ly News Magazinc, lor their kind permission tn reprint this article which appeared' in their IVIay 10, 1963 issue.-Editor.

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 o'lead time" is a constant concern of the 63-year-old Weyerhaeuser Co., which turns out more lumber and rvood products than any other company in the $6 billion indus' try that provides raw material {or U'S. homes, newsprint, boats, containers and furniture.

W'eyerhaeuser's 3.6 billion velvety green acres of timber, most of them in Washing' ton and Oregon, make up the largest pri' vate preserve in the U.S., but company for- esters 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, per{ectly shaped and full-grown in only 40 years. "We control the size of peas and the tenderness o{ corn," says a Weyerhaeuser scientist. "Why not a testtube forest?"

Weyerhaeuser's evergreen empire began in 1900 when Immigrant Lumberman Frederick Weyerhaeuser bought 900,000 acres of {orest from his St. Paul neighbor, Northern Pacific Railroad Builder James J. Hill; he paid $5,400,000 for property today valued at $I,750,000,000. In the early days, lumber mills customarily burned ofi 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 vears, it found a process to bleach fir pulp white to make it suitable for better-grade paper-making, developed paperboard that jwill 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 repre' sents ISVo o{ 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. Weverhaeuser. "You'd almost think that lumber is the byproduct now."

Lumber is almost that. Ten years ago lumber and pulp represented 80/o oIWey' erhaeuser's output. Today they represent

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