Both of these plants demonstrate the importance of extracting a natural resource and producing a product that makes the resource more valuable. These jobs add income to our citizens and tax revenue to our state economy. This is in stark contrast to West Virginia's other major natural resource, coal.The coal industry offers few value-added jobs and employment in mining continues to go down as machines perform more mining functions.
The photographs above show how the process of producing oriented strand board at Weyerhauser's Sutton plant is highly automated. From the crane that unloads logs to the conveyor belts that move the newly cut strands, there is very little human interaction.
Most human interaction involves solving problems should any machine in the manufacturing process malfunction. The photo above right shows the control room where each step in the OSB production process is carefully monitored by computers and humans. The other area where humans are heavily involved is in the maintenance of the various production machines. The Weyerhauser Sutton Plant is a highly-automated, capital intensive operation.
The above photo shows workers at Appalachian Timber Services involved in the production of railroad ties. This company produces treated wood products for the mining industry, railroad industry, and railroad bridge components. This is necessarily a labor intensive process that is only partially automated.
The above photo shows workers producing components for building railroad bridges. Like Weyerhauser, ATS burns scrap and waste wood for energy to drive the machinery of production. Both companies also use the less valuable parts of harvested trees as raw material in their production. This maximizes the value of West Virginia timber by using parts of the trees that were once abandoned. This has been a recurring theme on this trip as time and again the timber industry has demonstrated maximum efficiency, while minimizing the environmental impact of their industry.
This should be emulated by the coal industry and maximize the use of a valuable natural resource by creating value-added products. Burning coal is the poorest use of a valuable source of complex hydrocarbon compounds that could be used in value-added manufacturing processes with a smaller environmental impact.