Page 8 - Georgia Forestry - Summer 2018

Landowners Grab on to the E -commerce
Freight Train
Story by Ray Glier
Pulpwood for Boxes a Healthy Market
Private landowner Joe Hopkins is a two-way business partner with the colossus that is Amazon. On the front end, some of his small- diameter trees, even some of his
chip and saw trees, are the pulpwood that helps make the corrugated box that carries the prod- ucts of the behemoth company. Amazon ships approximately 1.8 million boxes a day because consumers no longer shop once a week. They shop every day.
On the back end of the deal, the boxes bearing Amazon’s wordmark, the curved arrow, land on Hopkins’ doorstep throughout the week. The nearest Walmart is 30 miles away from Hopkins’ home in the wood basket hamlet of Folkston, so he saves gas and orders online. It’s reasonable to assume one of those Amazon boxes on his front porch could have come from a tree that sat on a tract of land Hopkins forested.
“Any business that uses a forest product is good for my business,” Hopkins said. “The box business and the continued expansion of e-com- merce is going to be good for forest landowners. I realize it may hurt the mom-and-pop (brick- and-mortar) business, but would the greater
use of corrugated boxes help me? Yes, it would.” The emergent e-commerce market is pro- viding a healthy boost for Georgia’s forest
landowners.
There is an oversupply of wood in Georgia, a
result of the housing downturn 10 years ago that the wood economy hasn’t fully recovered from. The keen stewardship of land and replanting of trees by our forest landowners has added to the inventory. Amazon and other online retailers are taking some of the wood off our hands because of the need for corrugated shipping boxes. According to Forbes, Amazon’s market value is a staggering $471 billion, and that is by captur- ing just 37 percent of online business in the U.S. The online beast, which ships products in about 50 different-sized boxes, is still growing. Thus, the corrugated-box market is expected to grow by 20 percent by 2021, according to the analysts at Smithers Pira.
Hopkins is the president of Toledo Manu- facturing Company, which owns substantial acreage in South Georgia. The majority of his wood goes to the WestRock mill on Amelia Island, FL. WestRock is the second-largest producer of containerboard in North America,
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