CHIP MILLS
Chip mills are highly-mechanized facilities which rapidly
pulverize woodlands into pulp for pressed fiberboard and paper. Their
appetite for trees is voracious. A single mill can turn 200 truckloads
of logs per day into chips, and devour more wood in one month than an
average Virginia sawmill consumes in a year.
In the eastern U.S. alone, foresters estimate that an
area larger than all nine southern Appalachian national forests (4.5 million
acres) will be clearcut within a four-year period, to feed the 140 chipmills
which have moved into the east.
These 140 mills represent a quadrupling of the 32 mills
operating in the east in 1985.
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