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Weyerhaeuser () is a multinational corporation in the pulp and paper industry. It is based in Federal Way, Washington, United States. The company is the third largest pulp and paper company in the world, with manufacturing operations in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China, Mexico, Ireland, France and Uruguay, among others. It is the world's largest private owner of softwood timberland, managing 38 million acres (154,000 km²) in five countries.
It is the third largest owner in the United States, behind Plum Creek Timber and International Paper. Weyerhaeuser has approximately 55,200 employees in 18 countries (primarily in the U.S. and Canada).
Corporate history
| Financial Information | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | |
| Net Sales (US$M) | 22,629 | 21,931 | 19,873 | 18,521 | 14,545 |
| Net Earnings (Loss) (US$M) | 733 | 1283 | 277 | 241 | 354 |
In the late 1990s, the company consolidated its core businesses and exited its long held interests in mortgage banking, personal care products, financial services, and information systems consulting. Weyerhaeuser also made expansions into South America, Australia, and the rest of Asia.
In 1999 Weyerhaeuser purchased MacMillan Bloedel Limited, a large Canadian forestry company.
Current operations
Weyerhaeuser now has timber operations or offices in 44 American states, Canada, and 18 other nations. It imports timber products from Malaysia, Chile, and Brazil. In North America, Weyerhaeuser is one of the largest distributors of wood products. The company owns over seven million acres (28,000 km²) of land in the U.S., and owns or holds logging rights to more than 35 million acres (142,000 km²) of land in Canada. Weyerhaeuser has diversified widely beyond its roots in lumber and wood products, and today controls a vast network of over 100 subsidiaries in fields including construction, real estate sales and development (often on its cutover lands).
The company's operations are now divided into five major business segments:
- Timberlands — Grows and harvests trees in renewable cycles.
- Wood Products — Manufactures and distributes building materials for homes and other structures.
- Pulp and Paper — Produces a variety of papers, and the pulp to produce papers, absorbent products and for specialty uses such as photographic film.
- Containerboard Packaging and Recycling — Produces paper, boxes and bags to move products from factory to store to consumer. Collects and recycles wastepaper, boxes and newsprint to make new products.
- Real Estate — Builds single- and multi-family homes and develops land.
The company also has an IT internship program that develops professionals for its IT department.
Corporate governance
Current members of the board of directors of Weyerhaeuser are: Richard Haskayne, Robert Herbold, Martha Rivers Ingram, John Kieckhefer, Arnold Langbo, Don Mazankowski, Nicole Piasecki, Steven Rogel, Richard Sinkfield, D. Michael Steuert, James Sullivan, and Charles Williamson.Criticism
There have been some activists who have complained about company policies ranging from clear-cut logging to conversion of native forests to tree plantations devoid of biodiversity and mill closures among others.
Environmental concerns
Weyerhaeuser is North America’s top logger and distributor of forest products from old growth and endangered forests. More than four hundred global companies have already dissociated themselves from endangered forest destruction, including American forest products company Boise Cascade Corporation. Unlike the other leading businesses, Weyerhaeuser ignores evolving demands from its customers and refuses to respond to the crisis facing the world’s forests.
Weyerhaeuser has made many claims that their operations are “green” however facts tell a different story. More than 128,000 square kilometers (50,000 mile²) of Canadian public lands lay open to Weyerhaeuser’s environmentally destructive practices. Weyerhaeuser logs on lands as ecologically varied as the temperate rainforests of the Canadian Coat on Vancouver Island, to pine forests in the interior of British Columbia, to the slow-growing boreal forest stretching across Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario, and to the maritime forests of New Brunswick.
One third of Weyerhaeuser’s softwood timber comes solely from Canadian public lands. Each year, 650 square kilometres are felled by Weyerhaeuser’s chainsaws and turned into 2 x 4’s, toilet paper, and packaging mostly for export to the United States.
In 1999, Weyerhaeuser purchased MacMillan Bloedel, a large Canadian timber company that had agreed in 1998 to phase out clear-cut harvesting in British Columbia and pursue a new strategy to conserve old growth and wildlife habitat. However, Weyerhaeuser has not honoured the commitment; its new “variable retention” cutting on the B.C. coast is often indistinguishable from clear-cuts.
In addition, Weyerhaeuser's Kenora, Ontario mill, has been heavily criticized as a toxic pulp and paper mill that is poisoning the people of Grassy Narrows. Band members suffer from toxic levels of mercury released by Weyerhaeuser's mill. For decades, the company's Dryden, Ontario paper mill dumped the poison into the English River, where it accumulated in fish and groundwater.
Since the 1990s, increasing demand from Weyerhaeuser mills have driven accelerated cutting in the forests of Grassy Narrows. If adopted, Abitibi's new harvest plan would permit accelerated cutting through 2024 and cause incalculable damage to the forest and the people of Grassy Narrows.
Indigenous resistance
In Ontario, Weyerhaeuser purchases fiber for its Kenora and Dryden mills from forests within the traditional territory of the people of Asubpeeschoseewagong, or the Grassy Narrows First Nation. Weyerhaeuser buys 50% of the 1.4 million cubic meters of wood harvested by Canadian timber company Abitibi in the Whiskey Jack forest - part of which is the traditional territory of Grassy Narrows.
As a result, the Grassy Narrows First Nation have used non-violent direct action - in the form of blockades and protests - to try to halt logging on their traditional territory.
The Grassy Narrows First Nation is located 80 kilometers north of Kenora, in Northern Ontario, with a band membership of more than one thousand. The reserve is surrounded by over 2,500 square miles of forest within the band's "Traditional Land Use Area" - an area where the band has hunted, trapped, gathered berries, and fished for thousands of years. These forests make it possible for the people of Grassy Narrows to maintain many traditions which have been passed down from generation to generation.
Large-scale timber harvests since the 1950's have decimated these forests, and altered the Ojibway way of life forever. Large piles of trees are wasted, left to decay after they have been cut. Remaining land left after a cut is covered in herbicide and other chemicals, killing blueberry bushes and plants traditionally used for medicinal purposes. Without the forests, much of the wildlife is also disappearing, making it impossible to continue hunting and trapping on Grassy Narrows' traditional land.
According to Joe Fobister, spokesperson for the Grassy Narrows First Nation Environmental Committee, "Over 50 percent of our traditional land has been clear-cut. There's reforestation but it's all monoculture tree farming. They plant trees they're going to harvest again. The land is turning into a tree farm." Weyerhaeuser has no right to turn the forests of Grassy Narrows into paper. Aboriginal treaty rights set out in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and secured by Treaty #3 and the Canadian constitution clearly mandate that control over the land be returned to the people of Grassy Narrows. Despite this, Abitibi and Weyerhaeuser continue their assault on the people of Grassy Narrows. Abitibi has even resorting to advertising campaigns instructing schoolchildren in Grassy Narrows that Abitibi has a "spiritual tie" to the land. In response to the destruction of their land, the people of Grassy Narrows have resisted in every way they know how. From posting signs on all roads into the traditional land use area "declaring * land rights," to non-violent human blockades to obstruct logging roads, to filing a lawsuit against the Ontario government for allowing Abitibi to continue operations, the people of Grassy Narrows are not giving up without a fight.
Guns
On October 1, 2002, the company sent gun and drug sniffing dogs into the parking lot of their Valliant, Oklahoma plant looking for drugs in cars in response to an employee drug overdose. They found no drugs, but the dogs alerted on 12 cars with guns in them. The company then ordered the employees to open their cars for a hand search and rifles, shotguns, and handguns were found. The 12 employees were immediately suspended.Two days later, the company fired all twelve employees, including a shift supervisor of 23 years with an exemplary record. Jimmy 'Red' Wyatt and all the others said that they were never told of the policy change, extending the company gun ban to the parking lot, which had occurred in 2002.
The plant manager, Mr. Nebel said that firing the men was difficult but he felt safer with all the guns out of the parking lot. Mr. Nebel stated that all the employees had been warned of the policy change.
Several of the fired men have filed a civil suit against Weyerhaeuser for wrongful termination, with Tulsa attorney Larry Johnson representing them. Mr.Johnson, a longtime Second Amendment lawyer, said that this was an injustice that must be addressed. *
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Weyerhaeuser | Companies based in Washington | Multinational companies | Pulp and paper companies | Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange | Companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange
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