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OP-ED: HERE'S HOW TO SOLVE AMERICA'S 50 MILLION TON A YEAR OF SAWDUST PROBLEM
Nov. 26, 2025
Op-ed by David P. Tenny, President and CEO of the National Alliance of Forest Owners as it appeared in Agri-Pulse
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| David P. Tenny |
Washington, DC -- Across rural America, pulp and paper mills have been closing or downsizing at an alarming rate. These mills once purchased their wood fiber, including pulpwood, chips and sawdust, from sustainably managed forests. Mill closures have caused 50 million tons of annual wood fiber processing capacity to disappear. That means each year, 50 million tons of woody fiber -- the weight of about 550 Washington Monuments -- are stranded, wiping out hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for forest owners and sawmills.
This isn't just a market problem. It's a rural jobs problem, a housing problem and a forest-health problem. The solution is obvious. We need new markets for this material. A simple, commonsense and bipartisan way to help create new markets is to fix the definitions of woody biomass in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) so wood fiber can fully qualify as an eligible feedstock, as intended.
Without viable markets for lower-value wood and fiber, the economics of modern forestry fall apart. It would be like a rancher raising cattle for only the prime cuts of beef and throwing the rest away--no business could survive that way. To stay in business, cattlemen must sell a lot of ground beef. It is a similar story for the business of trees. About 80% of a log's value comes from dimensional lumber, and the remaining 20% must be recouped from the residuals, like chips, bark and sawdust--the "ground beef" of a tree.
When forest owners and sawmills can't sell their production residuals, disposal costs pile up. Higher costs ripple through the supply chain, driving some sawmills toward closure. This, in turn, drives up lumber prices, threatening to make housing even less affordable at a time when the nation is in a housing crisis.
The good news is that we can fix this. Airlines want more sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), and forest owners and sawmills have plenty of wood fiber to create the energy-dense biofuels they need. A significant obstacle, however, is the unnecessarily narrow criteria governing which woody feedstocks can contribute to the production of renewable fuel under the RFS. As the EPA currently interprets them, the existing criteria exclude most trees harvested from private lands, sawmill residuals and material from federal forests or rangelands at high risk of wildfire.
To read the entire op-ed click here.
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