Researcher turns pest into particleboard

When Turkish forestry engineer Salim Hiziroglu moved to Oklahoma four years ago, he found himself planted in the middle of an agricultural problem.

The associate professor at Oklahoma State University decided to craft a solution by taking on the troublemakers -- eastern red cedars.

The trees are the bunnies of the Oklahoma tree population.  

They multiply. And multiply.

 So far, they have covered 8 million Oklahoma acres. And if something isn't done soon, experts say, the number will grow to 20 million acres in the next 10 years.
 

That's a major problem for Oklahoma's rangeland, where each tree edges out grass and slurps up gallons of water daily.

The state's grasses have enough issues with hot, dry weather, let alone competition from water-guzzling evergreens. It's even worse news for the cattle that graze on the grass, or the wildlife making its home in it.

But Hiziroglu, a wood products specialist, found a commercial-grade solution for fast-growing, low-quality trees.
 

"They were saying, 'We have an eastern red cedar problem in Oklahoma,' and I said, 'Why not particleboard?'

" Hiziroglu recalled.
 

With plenty of red cedars to work with, he found a way to make particleboard without wasting any part of the trees, not even the needles.
 

The entire tree is chipped, reduced to particles and mixed with resin in a big machine that resembles a front-loading washer. The concoction then is poured into a forming box, essentially a giant cookie cutter that shapes it into panels.
 

Once the mixture sets, the panels are removed and placed in a hot press.
 

"It's just like making a birthday cake," said Hiziroglu, whose forestry expertise goes back three generations in his family.

The process works for a variety of Oklahoma's "underutilized" trees, including Osage or ange and mesquite, he said.
 

The chipped material from different kinds of trees can even be mixed. Hiziroglu already has made Osage orange-red cedar particleboard.
 

And the red cedars, often associated with fires and fence posts, actually make sturdy boards, he said. "Both single-layer and three-layer panels are comparable to any particleboard you can find on the commercial market."

Hiziroglu stressed that his work is purely research in the OSU Food and Agricultural Products Center. No one's manufacturing the particleboard just yet.
 

However, the center can work with companies interested in the process.
 

It's not that red cedars are bad. In fact, they do make good fence posts and craft items. Their oil is worth about $5 a pint and is used in everything from face cream to pet shampoo, Hiziroglu said.
 

But red cedars are so abundant and such a nuisance that they're often sprayed with herbicide or burned.

The trees have their own research group, the 48-member Oklahoma Redcedar Association, that works to answer producer and consumer questions about uses for the trees.
 

"In other words, we educate people on what the potential is to take this nuisance and make an asset out of it," said Paul Todd, ORA president and owner of Custom Grinding, a sawdust processing company in Oklahoma City.
 

"The average-size mature cedar tree will suck 30 gallons of water per day out of the soil," he said.

 That can be damaging to a typical area with 200 red cedars per acre.

 "It's absolutely impossible to do range cattle or range feeding if there's no range grass," Todd added. "Same thing for wildlife . . . if there's no ground cover."

Technically, red cedars aren't cedars at all. They're junipers. And though they are invading the state, it's really not the trees' fault.

They've been here all along.

"The reason they're a problem now, as opposed to say 200 or 300 years ago, is us humans," said Craig McKinley, an OSU professor and extension forestry specialist.

The highly flammable native trees once were kept in check by prairie fires.

 "Since we control fire, we've opened up the area to the invasion of the red cedar."