Norbord Re-Commissioned Its US-American OSB Plant in Jefferson

At the end of June, the Canadian wood-based-panels manufacturer Norbord re-commissioned its US-American OSB plant in Jefferson, which had been shut down indefinitely in January 2009. The company had already announced this step at the beginning of February and claims to have invested roughly US$10m in preparatory work since that announcement. With this re-commissioning, Norbord has reacted to the phased recovery of North American OSB markets, a recovery which however did not continue into the second quarter of this year. According to the business reported published on 25 July, Norbord achieved capacity utilisation of 105% in the second quarter in the six North American plants in operation at that time. In terms of total capacity, utilisation was 75%, as it had been one year before. The business report indicated that Norbord‘s European plants ran at full capacity in the first two quarters; the short-term fire-driven closure of the Belgian OSB plant in Genk in April was not taken into consideration in those figures.