By IAN ROSS
Queen’s Park has topped up its contribution to Flakeboard Company's expansion at its Sault Ste. Marie medium density (MDF) fibreboard mill.
The Markham-headquartered company has invested heavily in its Base Line Road facilities with a new melamine lamination mill and now has big plans to develop a patented dry resin application, a green energy project and more value-added manufacturing.
Flakeboard received a $1.6 million repayable loan in March from Ontario’s Ministry of Economic Development and Trade from their Advanced Manufacturing Investment Strategy (AMIS).
The loan is tacked onto a previous $1.6 million grant given to Flakeboard last fall from the province’s Forest Sector Prosperity Fund.
Operations manager Mike Rosso says the expansions are necessary for the Sault MDF mill to stay competitive, lower their material costs and offer a broader product line.
Last September, Flakeboard announced it was making $16.5 million in upgrades to the Sault plant in a series of projects, which including a system to generate energy by burning wood waste, along with much-needed upgrades to their press line to produce wood panels as thin as five millimetres for kitchen cabinets and other household wood products.
The line upgrades and other projects are expected to create 37 new jobs, both on the operational end and in long-term construction jobs on the site expected to last three years.
The dry resin system will require some new construction in 2008, with an extension onto Flakeboard’s main MDF building, as will the wood waste burner which comes on stream in 2008-2009.
Rosso says the first phase of their thin board production begins in May with new equipment being installed to begin operations. More machinery will come later this year to better optimize the process.
“The challenge is having a press that’s running and you have to install it on an opportunity basis.”
The upgrades will also improve the press’ out-feed, allowing them to run at higher speeds.
Their patented resin technology involves applying binding agent to wood product after drying. Rosso says the major benefit is reducing their resin consumption by 20 to 30 per cent, easily their biggest operating cost.
“To reduce that cost is a huge gain to us.”
Applying resin to fibre after drying is not an industry standard, says Rosso. “Anytime someone has tried to that, they’ve actually produced a lower quality board because they don’t get the resin distribution.
“With our application system we’re able to overcome the challenge of those quality issues.”
Rosso says Flakeboard faces the same competitive and cost pressures as other forestry companies in sourcing fibre, dealing with high energy costs and exporting to the U.S. with a strong Canadian dollar.
These days , business has been slow because of the slowing U.S. housing market.
“For the first time in our 11-year-history we’ve had a short order file of consequence where we haven’t a seven-day week order file,” says Rosso, but Flakeboard has picked up new customers and is working its way back to a full order book.
Rosso is proud there’s been no layoffs among its 145-person workforce or reduced schedules. “We rode it out and our staff responded very well.”
In the last two years, the ever-expanding wood products company added a second press line inside an 18,750-square-foot addition attached onto an already modern 52,500-square-foot melamine lamination plant which began operations in 2005.
Rosso had high praise for the province’s support for his company. Their initial plans to start a lamination plant were to find a building somewhere in the city and install an old press. Through government assistance they were able to construct a new building with two modern presses.
“We wouldn’t be in a position to move forward in our strategy without the support of these (provincial) programs,” says Rosso.
