Melcourt Industries - Forestry Journal

Barking up
the right tree
Melcourt Industries
Compared with timber and wood processing, the UK ‘conifer-bark business’ is relatively new. Until the 1970s, bark, a potentially
valuable, natural, carbon-neutral co-product of sawmilling and wood processing, was simply dumped. “That’s hard to
imagine today, given its value and breadth of use,” says Andy Chalmers, managing director of Melcourt Industries Limited,
“but now at Melcourt, we exploit this high-value, carbon-neutral, natural resource to the fullest extent.”
That’s something you quickly realise
once inside Melcourt’s expansive
screening, compost-mixing,
bagging and distribution centre at
Tetbury in Gloucestershire, when
confronted by huge mounds of
Melcourt’s branded products, each
with their own unique specification
and application.
On site at Tetbury
When I arrived on the Tetbury site,
a mighty Doppstadt SM818
tromell, in orange livery and ‘bright
and beautiful’ on an otherwise
murky, miserable day, was simultaneously
screening and spewing out
three entirely different grades, each
with its own branded product
specification.
The Doppstadt was fed, and
product piles were moved around,
by a fleet of Volvo 190L loaders.
“They are comparatively old but
well maintained and serviced, and
therefore doing the job,” said
Andy. Also in operation was the
company’s impressive Slootweg
(Dutch) growing media (compost)
mixing and bagging plant. It is
anticipated that additional equipment
will be installed soon.
Melcourt also takes in conifer
woodchip sourced within 100 miles
of Tetbury and screens it for various
markets, together with processed
bark from Melcourt’s other site at
Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire, for
packing or mixing into growing
media. The Bishop’s Castle site
processes in excess of 150,000
cubic metres of UK-grown, FSC
mixed conifer and redwood bark
per year. Bark is sourced from
large sawmills like BSW and
Pontrilas, wood panel manufacturer
Kronospan and a number of
other sawmills in the Welsh border
region.
Melcourt is clearly a dynamic
business, but it would be wrong to
view it as just another ‘chip it,
heap it and sell it’ operation. I
soon learned how this company is
at the forefront of product innovation
on the sustainable use of natural
resources and maintaining the
integrity of our environment,
alongside self-sufficiency and longterm
national prosperity.
Birth of bark-based
products
I was fascinated by the thought
that just four decades ago, before
carbon awareness, when chimney
sweeps were commonplace, hundreds
of thousands of
tonnes of British
bark were
dumped every
year.
According to
Andy Chalmers,
the ‘bark business’
began in
one of the most unlikely of places,
St Anne’s Board mill in Bristol,
which was manufacturing card
and cardboard for Imperial
Tobacco’s Bristol-based cigarette
factory in the 1970s. “In those
days,” he said, “surprisingly few
fruits of forestry were being utilised.
Trees were felled, snedded
and topped; the pulpwood or sawlog
element was transported to
the mill where the wood was summarily
stripped of bark, only for
this potentially valuable resource
to be thrown away.”
That was until the arrival of Jack
Aaren from the Forestry
Commission, who in one of those
‘milestone moments’ in British forestry,
came to Bristol to assess the
potential for changing bark into a
profitable forest co-product.
Amongst potential uses he investigated
was its use in the manufacture
of building blocks (bark has
natural insulation properties), horticultural
products and equestrian
surfacing. From this work
evolved a product called ‘Forest
Bark’, subsequently taken on
board by ICI as the first retail bark
mulch sold to gardeners.
“In those days,” said Andy
Chalmers, “most local authorities
had their own in-house parks
departments, spending lots of
money on hoeing municipal flower
beds. They were already starting
to look for alternatives. Spraying
herbicides to chemically control
weeds, or using a thick layer of
peat as mulch, were already raising
eyebrows and frowned upon,
but bark mulch suited the bill,
both economically and environmentally.”
Melcourt joins the market
When Melcourt
started in
1983
Forestry Journal 9/12
www.forestryjournal.co.uk
53

(75% owned by
Charles Ransford &
Sons of Bishop’s
Castle in Shropshire
and 25% by John
Latter), there were
already two companies
in the fledgling
bark market: Bristol
Bark Products, a
spin-off from Jack
Aaren’s pioneering
work, selling three
simple grades of
bark (coarse, medium
and fine) of variable
quality. The other company
was Camland Products Ltd, based
in East Anglia. They were using
bark from several species of conifer
(mainly Corsican and Scots pine)
sourced from Thetford Forest and
FC’s Brandon Central Depot. The
timber was processed into pit
props and telegraph poles.
Camland purchased the bark and
screened it into dedicated products
for specialist markets, including
mulch and soil compost, for the
Greater London Council and horticultural
growers.
Melcourt, as the ‘new kid on the
block’, was faced with either copying
these companies and selling at
a cheaper price, or finding out
exactly what the market wanted
and manufacturing products to
suit. They made enquiries of landscape
contractors. “They came
back with three core requirements,”
said Andy Chalmers,
“prompt telephone answering with
delivered prices quoted while they
were on the phone, guaranteed
delivery times and consistent product
quality, load after load.
“They also told us that we needed
to speak to landscape architects
and garden designers, who were in
Bagging Melcourt ‘Topgrow’ tree and shrub planting compost.
pole position in specifying the
products to be used. What came
back was a basic question: ‘What is
bark’ There was no industry-wide
specification and no British
Standard for these new products.
From this feedback Melcourt
identified the markets it wished to
service and went on to develop a
range of different grades of bark
and woodchip products.
In the rapid development that
followed, Melcourt introduced
product ranges to cover all applications,
with brochures to assist in
choosing the right product and
specification. They also raised the
industry profile by exhibiting at
trade exhibitions.
Ready for take off
“There was an initial delay,” says
Andy Chalmers, “as the market
took time to gel, but it eventually
took off in the early 1980s. Local
authorities quickly became our biggest
customers, each with its own
parks and landscaping department,
equipped with a substantial budget
and a clerk of works who ensured
that what was specified was actually
done.
“In those ‘halcyon days’, raw
bark was quite cheap to source and
this helped accelerate our market.
Things began to change in the
1990s. Local authority budgets
were progressively cut, but new
customers such as superstores and
business/industrial parks stepped in
to fill the breach.”
Another key factor in Melcourt’s
development was the formation of
an efficient distribution network.
“Most of our products are now
supplied loose in quantities up to
80 cubic metres” said Andy
Chalmers, “but we additionally
have a network of over 100 master
stockists who split them into smaller
quantities and sell them on to
local users. We have also developed
a range of bagged products aimed
at the retail market.”
Today, Melcourt offers 19 branded
products covering mulches, soil
ameliorants, planting composts
and walk surfaces.
Ups and downs
Varying market conditions over the
last three decades, as much, if not
more, on the supply side, have
The Doppstadt SM-818 was producing
three different product
specifications simultaneously.
been ridden out by
exploration and
innovation. In the
early days, bark was
essentially free, the
only cost being that
of collection. But
the forestry industry
soon got wise and
British bark, particularly
pine bark,
increased in price.
Melcourt started to
look abroad and in
2005 started to
import 40,000
cubic metres of Maritime pine bark
per annum from Spain. This worked
fine for ten or more years until the
credit crunch, some five years ago,
when Spain’s economy, especially
the construction sector, was
blitzed. The market for timber collapsed,
resulting in the closure of
sawmills and a sudden dearth of
bark.
Melcourt took another look
around the UK and secured a partnership
with a company based in
Norfolk to buy up to 50,000 cubic
metres of processed bark, sourced
from Corsican and Scots pine in
the Thetford Forest area. All of the
company’s haulage requirements
are subcontracted out. Raw materials
coming in are with AW
Jenkinson which has a four-man
team on site at Tetbury monitoring
the movements of 70+ trucks.
Loose products going out are also
handled by AW Jenkinson, and
packed products by Hacklings,
which is part of the PalletLine
Group.
“Ninety five per cent of our
business is in the UK,” said Andy
Chalmers, “but we are moving forward
with exports, mainly into the
Far East (Malaysia, Vietnam, Hong
Kong and China), especially for our
Bio-Filtration Solutions range of
products, including Melcourt
Heather, raw material for which is
sourced from the North Yorkshire
Moors.” Bio-Filtration Solutions is a
range of peat-free, recyclable, natural
air filtration materials used by
industries such as sewage, sludge
and waste-water treatment plants,
abattoirs, animal by-product rendering
and food processors, to cure
the problem of ‘nasty niffs’.
Melcourt Industries now turns
over £5million a year and is 50%
owned by Charles Ransford & Sons
and 50% by Alan Jenkinson, whose
business interests include half ownership
of Berite Sawmills Limited, as
well as the haulage company that
carries his name.
54
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Forestry Journal 9/12

Down to earth
Managing Director Andy Chalmers has many years of
hands-on experience in forestry.
In what was clearly a milestone
moment for Melcourt’s product
expansion and development, the
company embarked on supplying
peat-free growing
media in the 1990s. Now
they claim to be the only
UK specialist providing
bark- and wood-based
compost ingredients and
peat replacement growing
media.
These are clearly
timely developments
given
Government-set
targets are for all
local authority and
central government
contracts to
be peat free by
2015, followed by
all retail products
in 2020 and professional
growing
media ten years
later. “All Melcourt
barks originate
from British or
European forests managed on a
fully sustained basis. We subscribe
to both the FSC and the Soil
Association and use products with
these certifications wherever possible,”
says Andy Chalmers.
Supply and demand
Whilst Andy Chalmers spends a lot
of time with customers in the arb,
amenity, landscape and leisure sectors,
he is in fact a forester, having
come up through the FC and private
companies (including UPM
Tilhill, Fountain Forestry, Forest
Thinnings and EFG plc) both at
home and abroad. He even
remembers selling sawlogs to G
Halsey’s Sawmill at London Colney
(near St Albans) in Hertfordshire,
where my grandfather worked for
50 years before it was closed to
make way for housing some 40
years ago.
As an experienced forester and MD
of a company that needs British
conifer bark, Andy Chalmers sees
the need for UK forestry to replant
all the conifers clearfelled and to
massively extend planting. The
industry needs to provide the
resources required for timber and
wood processes and associated
natural materials like bark, on
which his company relies.
The impending shortfall of
UK-grown conifer bark resources
could set a ceiling on companies
like Melcourt. The professional
growing media market, for example,
supplies 1 million cubic metres
a year. “If needs be, I could access
100,000 cubic metres of bark fines
today,” said Andy Chalmers, “but I
cannot import bark because it is
too expensive for this market.”
He dismisses some of the wilder
claims over timber imports from
markets as far afield as Canada,
Brazil, South Korea and Australasia,
especially those for industrial-scale
biomass burning. He doubts
whether these countries would be
in position to sell the UK all it
needs, even if they wanted to.
He bemoans the fact that, in
spite of all the expert advice,
including the Read Report, UK forestry
is failing to grasp the nettle,
while the Government, like Nero,
“Fiddles while Rome burns.”
Dr Terry Mabbett
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