Wood and Wood Products Sector is reviewed in this article and we hope you find it informative and helpful for your research.
Wood Industry in Nigeria
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Wood is a versatile raw material, the use of which is almost infinite. Wood and wood products are made up of hard materials, especially from trees for construction and manufacturing.
This substance makes up the central part of the trunk and branches of a tree. This solid wood forms the basis of numerous labor-intensive industries like plymills, sawmills, board mills industries, residential construction as well as furniture manufacturing.
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This is basically used for construction, to manufacture various items, or even as fuel as this depends on the wood of a particular species of tree.
As a wood fiber, it is a basic raw material for paper and paper products manufacturing.
It is quite surprising that in some technologically advanced countries, wood is already being converted to plastics, synthetic textiles, glues and some bonding agents, and other industrial chemicals.
The possibilities of converting wood cellulose and lignin into sugars, pentons, alcohol, fodder, yeast, and other products through various biological and chemical techniques have been reported in the last two decades. It shows that the Wood and Wood Products Sector has an advantage.
In Nigeria, wood has always played some crucial roles in the economy. During the period 1960 to 1970 when agriculture dominated the economy, wood and wood products earned substantial foreign exchange and ranked amongst the highest employment-generating sectors. For example, this sector earned a yearly average foreign exchange of about 308 million naira to 412 million naira or about 2.4 percent of the Gross National Product and it was an increment to the Nigerian sector.
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Industries Operating in the Country are sawmill, plymill, particleboard mills, matches, furniture manufacturing, flush door, wood preservation, toothpicks, Medicare spoons, and confectionery sticks. Of these, the giant industries appear to be sawmilling and furniture manufacturing in terms of the number of operating mills and estimated cubic volume of log inputs.
There are eight plymills in Nigeria but about seventy-nine types of raw materials are required by various wood and wood products industries in the country.
Some of these represent finished products from some of the industries For example, the furniture industries require veneer, lumber, plywood, and particleboard produced by other industries within the sector. Furniture uses about fifty-eight percent of all the identified essential raw materials.
Wood, as solid logs or lumber, is an essential raw material for all the ten identified wood-based industries. The wood raw materials used in 1988 were about 6,712,300m3 while the estimated installed capacity was about 8,831, 750m3, and about ninety-five percent of these pass through the sawmill.
Conclusively in the wood and wood Products Sector, imported raw materials in the sector consist of overlays, Formica, and melamine. foul and most of the adhesives, foams, fittings, and fabrics.
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Nigeria exports some of its wood products to Britain and other countries. With increasing technological knowledge, the products from wood would grow steadily.
