LITTLE TREES GAIN

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 July 1936, Page 14

LITTLE TREES GAIN

AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS. British Columbia, now largely dependent in an economic sense on its huge lumber industry, must face the fact that the world will not require big trees in the future and must prepare/to reorganise ( its whole industrial structure, the provincial Legislature was told by Dr. Allen Harris, a noted young Canadian natural scientist of the University of British Columbia. He declared chemistry had perfected methods of utilising small trees and making out of them lumber now cut from the giant timbers which are the chief commercial product of British Columbia. The University of lowa, he said, had conducted experiments which had succeeded in making imitation wood of the highest quality and imitating every known species, out of peanut shells and cotton stalks. Soon, he Believed, the United States would require no further pulp and paper from Canada —a business which forms one of Canada’s leading exports to its neighbour. Instead, the United States would meet all its own needs for raw material through the use o£ small trees, cut after 10 years’ growth, and of other articles convertible by chemistry into an innumerable variety of commercial products. All this, he said, would force Canada to reorient its economy and to prepare for it he advocated the es- ] tablishment of a research institution 1 and a non-political council of leading men from all branches of life to plan the future industrial progress of the country.