Mesa, AZ— Arizona’s forest restoration efforts took a significant leap forward recently as the state-of-the-art engineered wood plant near Flagstaff, AZ, of NewLife Forest Restoration, headquartered in Mesa, achieved full production. The first of its kind in Arizona, the plant uses highly automated equipment to convert low-value “restoration-grade” timber into high-grade lumber.
“Forest restoration can pay for itself,” said Ted Dergousoff, New Life’s CEO. “We believe this plant will revolutionize Arizona’s forest restoration efforts, which are desperately needed to reduce the scourge of catastrophic wildfires.”
Forest restoration requires the removal of smaller and lower-grade timber from the forest, which otherwise acts as fuel for wildfires, to make room for the larger, higher-value trees to thrive. Traditionally, restoration work has been economically challenging because of the high costs to remove slash coupled with low revenue from lower-grade timber.
NewLife’s new engineered wood plant takes small and low value logs with knotholes and transforms them into high-value lumber through a high-speed process. With this game-changing manufacturing capability now located in the heart of Coconino County, Arizona’s forest products industry can ramp up to meet the landscape-scale restoration demands of the forest.
NewLife has tripled the size of its forest restoration operations in light of these developments with three forest thinning crews now active and a fourth crew mobilizing. Each crew is capable of restoring 2,000-2,500 acres per year. NewLife plans to gradually increase to 25,000-plus acres of restoration capacity over the next 18-24 months.
Based in Arizona, NewLife Forest Restoration, Arizona’s leading sustainable forestry and wood products manufacturing company manages and restores forests on a landscape scale to mitigate the risks of catastrophic wildfire. NewLife operates the group’s harvesting and manufacturing facilities which include multiple sawmills located across Arizona.
For more information, visit www.nlfpaz.com.
