Issues with wood (chips, logs) have been an on-going battle between mill folks (the people who use the wood) and woodlands folks (the people who bring the wood in)....and with wood being the biggest raw material cost (with fiber being the finished product) you'd think that the paper industry would have a pretty good handle on this. If you did think it - you'd be wrong.
It was almost as if the two groups (mill and woodlands) worked for different companies. Early in my career, the mill started taking whole tree chips. Mill operations became erratic - and the mill suspected the chip supply. I was given the task of setting up a chip testing program - to test every chip truck that came in (about 150). We purchased a trailer, chip classifier, and an oven.
The first week of testing, we had the results we suspected - there was a problem with chips. The next week was spent with the woodland folks looking over our procedures and testing - to say we were not getting a representative sample. So the third week was spent perfecting our procedures.....and the 4th week produced the same results.......but nothing changed. The 5th week, nothing changed....the offending companies were still bringing in the same quality of wood and the same amount of wood.
We continued the testing program for 9 weeks and shut it down when nothing changed.....well....almost nothing. During this intense scrutiny, the scale house operator noticed water leaking from one of the chip trucks. Further investigation showed that the truck had been modified so that one of the fuel tanks was actually a water tank with a plug in the bottom. The truck driver had a string which pulled the plug out right after weighing in....by the time he had unloaded, the water tank would be empty - thus the mill was buying water being drained to the ground.
When the rest of the trucks from this company were checked - they all had been modified.... some estimates were that over $1 million dollars had been scammed from the company.
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