Associated British Ports (ABP), the UK’s largest ports group, has had another busy year.

More than half of ABP’s 21 ports in and around the UK coastline handle forest product cargoes, ranging from logs, kiln-dried timber, telegraph poles and Christmas trees to paper, wood pulp and board materials such as plywood, fibreboard and veneers.

ABP handles nearly two million tonnes of forest products of all types every year, reflecting the importance the company attaches to this cargo, and justifying ABP’s investment in dedicated stevedoring, storage, value-added processing and distribution services.

The ports of Ayr and Troon, Cardiff and Barry, Garston, Hull and Goole, Grimsby and Immingham, Ipswich, King’s Lynn, Lowestoft, Newport, Silloth and Teignmouth regularly handle forest products.

Highlights at the Port of Newport in 2001 include the expansion of the port’s timber trade, with Jewson deciding to concentrate its West Coast imports of timber and panel products through the port, ‘significantly’ expanding its operation there. A total of 80,000 tonnes of timber and wood products were handled in 2001 and there is expected to be a significant increase in traffic this year.

Additionally, Premier Forest Products, one of the country’s largest independent importers of timber and timber-based products, chose Newport as the site of its new head office. The majority of its trade is now handled through the port, with shipments being received from Brazil, the Baltic states, Spain and the Far East.

Important infrastructure investment exceeding £2m was also carried out at Newport and the port’s east lead-in jetty is being refurbished to improve and renew the 80-year-old structure which is used to assist deep-sea vessels when making their final approaches into Newport. These works are expected to be completed in April.

The port’s director Budha Majumdar said the addition of Jewson and Premier had made other companies sit up and take notice. ‘Suddenly some companies realise there is an advantage in going to a particular port and then their competitors cannot afford not to be there as well.’

But before securing this recent business, timber throughput at Newport had declined substantially. Mr Majumdar said the port had handled significant volumes of deep-sea timber cargoes from Canada and the Far East during the 1990s but it all disappeared ‘in a very short space of time’.

‘A lot of people got nervous about using timber from unmanaged forests as well,’ he added. It was at this time that Baltic timber came into its own in terms of quality and price.

He said customers were being secured on longer-running contracts and, as a result, the port had confidence in making significant further investment in new facilities. The port has already ploughed hundreds of thousands of pounds into upgrading storage and cargo handling equipment.

He believes the port’s location at the end of the M4 contributes to customers running a more cost-effective haulage operation.

Mr Majumdar said timber producers were dealing ever more directly with end customers, with not so much evidence of single shippers.

At Grimsby and Immingham 2001 was also a busy year. Rowlinson Timber Ltd, one of Grimsby’s most important timber importers, is due to commission its own treatment plant in the second quarter of 2002.

Hull recently started handling deep-sea imports of plywood for the first time in 10 years, with shipments from the Far East and South America for Jewson, which has extended its storage facilities on King George Dock to cope with the extra business.

Jewson’s shipments of plywood are handled by Northern Cargo Services (NCS), the Hull-based stevedoring company ABP acquired in September 2000. NCS, which is the sole operator of ABP’s Finland Terminal, also handles imports of paper for new customer Holmen Paper.

Last year proved to be an excellent year for Ayr and and Troon’s ground-breaking, environmentally-friendly TimberLink initiative, which is helping to reduce road traffic in Scotland by transporting logs by sea to Ayrshire from the Argyll peninsula. It has removed more than two million lorry miles in under two years from Argyll, Kintyre and Ayrshire roads.

The quality handling equipment and highly-skilled operators employed by TimberLink result in 3,000 tonnes being loaded within 36 hours.