Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia, is quite fortunate. Thanks to the rich resources of wood raw materials, these countries can develop wood, plank, and furniture-related businesses. Malaysia uses its own pristine tropical rainforest and recently developed oil palm plantations to promote the development of the timber industry. The latest data (January-June 2020) for timber product exports from Malaysia stood at 9.6 billion ringgit (2.3 billion US dollars). The figure was down 9.1 percent from the same period in 2019. On the other hand, imports of wood products increased to 3 billion ringgit (700 million), a 13 percent increase from last year, as shown in Table 1. Although the COVID-19 outbreak has affected businesses since April 2020, we can still see a general trend that exports are struggling to sustain growth, while imports increasingly need to meet local demand.
If we analyze the data further, we find that exports of sawn timber, plywood, fibreboard, wooden building materials, and woodworking products are constrained by the availability of raw materials and have generally declined. The only growth area for timber exports is wooden furniture
For the Malaysian woodworking industry, the furniture manufacturing industry is an extremely important category. It not only creates a very high export output value but also as the main customer group and consumer of the Malaysian wood and board industry, the furniture manufacturing industry is also considered to be an important category. important value-added services. If we take inventory of wood products imported into Malaysia, we will find that most of them are raw materials used in the furniture manufacturing process.
Promoting the development of the furniture industry is the current challenge we face in Malaysia. In addition to addressing issues related to investment opportunities, marketing, labor, and skills, we also need to address the sustainable availability of raw materials.
The much-maligned Malaysian oil palm plantations may offer a sustainable, carbon-friendly solution to this dilemma. Perhaps we are not aware of this yet - because discarded tree trunks can be converted into value-added wood products, oil palm has the potential to become a major wood resource for years to come. With increasing pressure on domestic timber resources in Malaysia and increasing competition for wood fibers around the world, discovering new available wood raw materials is crucial not only for the furniture industry but also for the wood-based building materials industry.
Why oil palm?
Naturally because of its abundant and growing resources - in Malaysia, oil palm plantations reach nearly 10 million acres. Oil palm has a wide range of applications in the fields of food, biotechnology, and energy, but after the palm tree reaches 20 years of age, the oil yield will drop significantly.
Due to this feature, oil palm plantations need to be cleared and replanted regularly after 20 years of planting to ensure oil yield. On an average of about 10 million acres, nearly 500,000 acres are replanted each year. As a result, the replanting of oil palm in Malaysia's "non-productive" plantations has accumulated a huge amount of wood, which is estimated to provide 20 million trunks a year.
Rotten tree trunks and wood chips are generally used as fertilizer, but this can attract beetles and rats that can damage the seedlings. These oil palm woods are not used, mainly because the density distribution inside the trunk is extremely uneven, the moisture content is high, and its structure and properties are significantly different from the "normal" wood species.
Early research and experiments on the use of oil palm trunks for products have shown high technical and economic potential, but for the reasons described above, oil palm has not yet been put into industrial applications. So far, there is no comprehensive and viable solution for investors and companies interested in utilizing oil palm wood, and there is little information on relevant products, markets, and processing. In addition, machines and tools will have to be adapted and optimized to process oil palm wood. These will all present unique challenges.
The density and performance characteristics of wood show great variation in different tree trunks. The density is between 150-700kg/m3, the outer trunk density is the largest, and the inner layer is the smallest.
Hard and long dark wood fibers can be detected in the wood, and these fibers have a similar appearance to reinforced concrete in cross-section. They are embedded in a very soft cellular matrix that gives the wood its strength. The quality of the wood is relatively uniform because there are no protruding nodules and growth-related defects, and the unique wood grain structure of the oil palm enhances the aesthetic value of the wood product.
However, oil palm trunks have a high moisture content (150-600 percent of dry wood). Because of this high moisture content, combined with the sugar and starch in the wood, soon the fungus kicks in and the wood begin to rot. Anti-rot requires special logistics in the supply chain, starting from the cutting of palm trees to wood processing, as well as a very complex drying process.
It has to be admitted that in addition to the above-mentioned shortcomings of oil palm trees, and the fact that we can still obtain alternative raw materials from natural forests, these have been hindering the industrial development of oil palm wood. It may take some time before oil palm wood and wood planks are the material of the future and are available in large quantities in Malaysia, but it is reassuring that in these challenging years ahead, this untapped feedstock is potential.
Note: This article is Peter Fitch's last article as Chairman of the Malaysian MDF Manufacturers Association. Peter has resigned from his position and entered into a joint venture with IOI Plantations to develop and exploit abundant, usable, sustainable biological resources, including oil palm wood, which can be used to produce sawn and log equivalents Material.