Course held to improve drying of lumber

The Centre for the Development of Enterprise in Brussels, Belgium is sponsoring a regional course in Timber Drying and Kiln Operations, which is currently being held in Belize. According to Gary Alymer, head of C.D.E.’s Caribbean Regional Office, it’s an issue that affects both furniture and logging industries, and comes at a time when Belize has a surplus of lumber that needs to be processed.

Gary Aylmer, Head, C.D.E. Caribbean Regional Office

“Every furniture manufacturer in the Caribbean can suffer from these problems so they are very aware of it. Those that have studied or worked with the material for anytime know that you have to have a certain dryness of the wood. You can air dry them if you use a better control, if you use a special machine called a kiln. The centre has worked for twenty years in the wood industry. We find that there are not enough kilns and where the kilns are in operation there’s not proper training.”

“We take experienced operators and we bring them on a one week course. At the end of that time they’re able to understand their material better, what they’re doing better, and this enables them to solve problems. We find and very strong and very powerful impact from the course. We find that in some cases the kiln’s can take twice as much through. This is particularly a problem here at the moment and is very useful with the amount of damage from the beetle, there is a lot of pine now becoming available more than some of the factories can handle. So anything we can do to make the factories more effective, particularly by getting a greater output. This can make a big make a big difference to the companies.”

Over the last two years C.D.E. has assisted fifteen Belizean businesses in agro-processing and fish farming as well as furniture manufacturing. Successful participants in the programme will be awarded an internationally recognised certificate of competency.