Developments in the Timber Trade

There has been tremendous expansion in the timber preservation industry in the UK during the post-war years. The increased importance of timber preservation as an ancillary industry to the timber trade and to the timber-using industries has been due to a number of reasons. Timber is no longer a cheap material and has been subjected to intense competition from other materials, such as steel, concrete, aluminium, etc., so that the user now demands the maximum possible life from timber with the minimum expenditure on maintenance. With the shortages of timber during the Second World War and the post-war years timber was used very much more scientifically than in the past. This helped it to compete more successfully with other materials and opened up new markets, but it meant also that if used untreated under conditions where there was a danger of insect or fungal attack, there was no longer the safety margin which had existed in the past when normally far larger timber sizes had been used than were actually required for a specific end-use in the constructional industries. In addition, whereas in the past much of the softwood for constructional purposes had come from the natural forests where the trees had taken from 200 to 600 years to grow and where there was a small proportion of sapwood, in the post-war period most of the softwood has come from plantations where the aim has been to produce a marketable tree in 90–120 years or less.