GMC industry sponsor, timber processor AKD Softwoods, is undertaking an upgrade of its Colac dry mill facility to improve recovery and productivity, allowing it to supply more structural-grade material to satisfy robust demand.
AKD is the largest softwood sawmiller in Australia, selling finished timber products for use in housing, landscaping and agricultural markets. It also has a plantation estate that supplies sawlog to its operations.
The Colac-based business, founded by an association of families in 1955, now has operations in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. It has six sawmills producing more than a million cubic metres – or 25,000 double-semi-trailer trucks – of timber products from sawlog a year, which is as much as a quarter of Australia’s production.
Recently AKD outlined substantial investment in upgrading its sawmill processing sites, including a major overhaul of the Colac dry mill at a cost of more than $17 million.
Workplace Relations and Risk Manager David McGinness tells GMC the current equipment at Colac has been in place for over a decade and new machinery will be sourced from the US, Europe or locally, depending on what is appropriate for each part of the operation, to make the facilities more efficient.
“We’re upgrading our facility at Colac dry mill with the installation of an optimised trimming line to improve grade recovery and add value to the output produced. Productivity and safety will also be improved,” he says. “We’re constantly upgrading, keeping the facilities up to date to the best practice and standard that we can.”
The Australian-owned business sells to large truss and frame manufacturers, wholesalers and large timber merchants and retailers. Residue is sold internationally for paper and packaging or biomass power generation, and some is used on site to generate heat to dry timber.
Logs arrive at the Colac dry mill in a “green” state – 50% moisture – and are rough sawn and dried out to around 18% moisture content before being put them through a planer, known as the dry mill, to mould them into the finished size.
“The piece of timber comes out once it’s dry, it might be 100 by 50 millimetres – which is your old two by four – and you then put it through a planer and it comes out at its finished size of 90 by 45 millimetres,” Mr McGinness says.
“That’s the piece of timber you buy at your hardware store. It’s nice and flat and smooth and easy to handle. That’s what the planer does, planes the rough-sawn dry material.”
AKD conducted major acquisitions in 2018, growing from around 400 employees – mostly in Colac – to triple in size to around 1000 people across operations in three states.
“It’s been a substantial change to our business and the last few years has been a period of consolidating new sites, bringing those sites across to the AKD way of doing business.”
The market is running hot, fuelled by residential construction and industrial pallet and packaging markets.
“None of our sawn timber gets exported, it is all used in Australia,” Mr McGinness says. “Demand for timber products over the last couple of years has been strong which is linked to new housing growth and alterations and additions activity at record highs.”
Elsewhere, AKD’s Caboolture sawmill in Queensland is set to double as additional sawlog availability locally supports a major scaling up of that site, and at Tumut in New South Wales a new green mill saw line will be installed over the next 18 months at a cost of over $24 million.
Over five years, AKD has also invested $29 million in plantation and land acquisitions, growing the plantation estate by an average of 5% a year through acquisitions and lease arrangements.
It now has over 12,000 hectares of sustainably grown radiata pine plantations in Victoria, NSW and South Australia, a treatment and distribution centre in NSW, two post and pole preservation businesses, multiple treatment facilities, and the Geelong softwood chip export operation.
Mr McGinness says Colac is still AKD’s single biggest site, and woodchip from that operation is exported from Geelong.
“That’s going well, the demand for fibre internationally is strong,” he says.