Hambro will close three of its plants

Change means new focus for local firm

 After several years of unprofitability and periodic layoffs, Hambro Group is permanently closing all three of its particleboard manufacturing plants, including Hambro Forest Products in Crescent City, Humboldt Flakeboard Panels in Arcata and Blue Ridge Panels in North Carolina. 

Company CEO Wes White announced plans “to move the Hambro Group’s focus from one heavily based upon wood products, specifically particleboard production, to one of ‘eco-friendly’ and transportation businesses,” in a Dec. 9 letter sent to customers and suppliers.

Hambro Group includes five entities outside of particleboard manufacturing, which offer services like trucking, hauling garbage and sludge, and composting fertilizer.

The company currently has 138 employees. White said 60 of these people will be laid off due to the plant closures: 46 workers in North Carolina, 10 in Crescent City and four in Arcata.

The decision has been a long time coming, White told the Triplicate.

He estimated that the Crescent City plant has only been operational for 50 days in all of 2011. During the off-periods employees collected unemployment insurance and were then hired back as needed.

The demand for particleboard depends on the housing market and new construction has shrunk by 75 percent in the past few years, he said.

“All three particleboard plants were losing money,” White said. “It’s a demand issue and it’s an overcapacity issue. It’s the economy.”

Until Hambro’s other enterprises grow, “there’s no place,” for the particleboard plants’ employees in the company, White said.

The plants in Arcata and North Carolina will be liquidated and sold, while the Crescent City facility will continue as a shuttered, but intact corporation in the hopes that someday, things might turn around.

“We’re keeping the plant here in town intact in the hopes that someday the market will come back and we’ll restart. I can’t sit here and look in a crystal ball and say we’re going to restart it. It would have to come back pretty strong,” he said.

As the dust settles at the particleboard plants, White hopes that Hambro’s wood-processing expertise will have another outlet soon.

“The future to me is there we have a lot of wood-based knowledge and a lot of wood-based equipment sitting here that is currently idled.word glitch? My intent is to find green energy that would utilize wood,” he said. “There’s a good future for wood utilization as some kind of energy source. We’ve got to get repositioned first.”

Hambro was founded nearly 50 years ago as a particleboard manufacturer in an effort to create a profitable use for waste products made by the local timber industry.

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