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| Camden's plywood port stacks up as tops in U.S. |
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8/8/2003 Courier-Post News Article
By EILEEN STILWELL
Courier-Post Staff
A string of coffee-colored rail cars pauses on the Camden Waterfront, waiting to be loaded with plywood.
Forklift operators buzz in and out of the cars, packing 2,000-pound crates of plywood tighter than a fashionista's suitcase.
Others squeeze piles of the wooden sheets into trucks with barely an inch to spare.
It's a typical day at the marine terminals in Camden, the largest plywood port in the country.
A humble building material found in everything from floors to furniture, coffins and guitars, plywood is the second-largest breakbulk commodity in Camden.
Breakbulk is the opposite of containerized cargo. It arrives in sacks, coils, crates - anything but a steel box.
Camden's top breakbulk shipments productsin volume are fruit, wood products and steel.
"The business just keeps growing. Countries of origin have changed since we got our first ship from Korea in 1969, but the volume shows steady growth," said Joseph Balzano, executive director of the South Jersey Port Corp., a quasi-state agency that operates the Beckett Street and Broadway terminals.
Now, ships from Indonesia, Malaysia, West Africa and Brazil call regularly on the Delaware River. Once the product is unloaded, truckers from companies like Home Depot and Lowe's. Loew's cart it away for the home building and improvement market.
So far this year the port has posted a 23 percent increase in plywood tonnage over last year. Projections for the full year are in excess of 450,000 tons.
When business is this good, storage is scarce. Also, fear of fire is the number-one threat to wood sheds.
Between the two terminals, Balzano estimates he has the equivalent of 20 acres of covered space, stacked 20 feet high, with wood products awaiting for distribution by rail or truck up and down the East Coast and as far west Westas Chicago.
All warehouses have sprinklers, and supervisors strictly enforce a no-smoking rule, he said.
A superstitious man, Balzano says he can't talk about fire and plywood in the same sentence.
John Chaffin, spokesman for the International Wood Products Association, said plywood imports are growing because the cost of domestic plywood is skyrocketing. In addition, the new housing market in many regions of the U.S. is booming.
The average do-it-yourselfer buys a 4' by 8' sheet of plywood between one-quarter 1/4 to three-quarters 3/4- of an inch thickthat comes from Southeast Asia, called luan, he said.
"About 10 percent of the plywood used in the United States is imported. The rest comes from the West, the South and some from Canada. The volume is increasing because of favorable trade agreements and because domestic product may cost double or more than the imported," said Chaffin.
The association of about 100 importers closely monitors issues, such as fuel prices, trade agreements, port security and incidents of illegal logging.
"Since wood is our livelihood, we make it our business to lobby for proper management and sustainability. When countries like Indonesia deplete forests without replanting, we're concerned about the future of the raw material. Wood takes the least amount of energy to make, is renewable and recyclable, but it must be managed or there won't be any," he said.
Don Thompson, president of Thompson Mahogany Co., a large importer of tropical hardwoods in Philadelphia and one of South Jersey Port Corp.'s oration's better customers, said plywood is nearly earlyrecession-proof.
"We used to carry a lot of teak for the marine industry, but when it switched to plastic, the market disappeared. Now we float between the
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