Businesses

Wood Chips for Paper Products and More

From your coffee cup and napkin to your favorite magazine, the paper used to make them likely began as wood chips.

Green Diamond is a provider of clean, high-quality wood chips that supply many paper mills in Japan, China and the U.S. This part of our business helps generate value from what would otherwise go to waste. It’s a win for our company, customers, sawmill partners and environment.

Here’s how our wood chip business works: As sawmills process harvested trees, often originally grown by Green Diamond, small pieces of residual wood are generated and delivered to our California Chip Facility on Humboldt Bay—one of only three West Coast facilities that can load ocean-going wood chip vessels. This makes us an ideal supplier for Japanese and Chinese pulp mills that turn the chips into a variety of paper products. Many of these customers seek our products because of the rigorous Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®) certification standards. We also use whole-log chipping to process smaller logs and other tree parts that sawmills cannot use. Examples include tanoak, red alder and Sitka spruce. In these cases, we chip the entire log to supply domestic pulp facilities, many of which are located in the U.S. northwest.

About Our Chip Facility

Situated on Humboldt Bay in California, we use a pneumatic loading system to increase the amount of material loaded on a vessel. The facility’s conveyor stretches nearly a quarter of a mile.

Key Benefits of Our West Coast Facility

1. Providing a vital waste outlet
The facility plays a vital role in providing sawmills with an outlet for residual material—a necessity to keep them operating.
2. Revitalizing Humboldt Bay
Originally built in the late 1970s, we acquired our chip facility in 2005 and loaded our customers’ first outgoing chip vessel in 2014. The facility has helped revitalize the area and supported local business growth and a thriving economy.
3. Supporting local workers and unions
In line with local regulations, we use the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union to carry out our operations on the water (anything expanding beyond our dock). Green Diamond’s business supports union workers and operations in Humboldt Bay.
4. Embracing sustainable best practices
Our California chips are certified under FSC standards and create revenue while minimizing waste. We also use a pneumatic, or air pressure-based, process to load the chips onto ocean-going vessels, which enables customers to minimize their carbon output by transporting the product as efficiently as possible.

The Southeast Market

Our Southeast timberlands also produce wood chips that are certified under Sustainable Forestry Initiative® standards. This region primarily supports European markets, where compressed wood pellets are a popular alternative energy source for cooking and heating homes.

Learn more about our renewable energy products.

To inquire about our chip products contact:

chips@greendiamond.com