Was David Maynier, the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, maxxing or mogging when he described his first engagement with the forestry sector as “truly inspiring” and “a great visit”?
Maxxing is Dictionary.com’s word of the year, and mogging is Collins’. Both are apparently most at home among Generations Z and Alpha. I have no idea who these “Gens” are or why we are so keen to lump people into them, but it fascinates me. But I digress.
The good news is that the minister, who took office in July 2026, finally visited Zululand in October. He met with Forestry South Africa, Mondi, Sappi and NCT, and the sector is glad to have him on the ground.
On a positive note, Gerard Victor, CEO of PG Bison, says their project management team is ahead of schedule with the new R240m high-volume, high-pressure MFB line at the Mkhondo facility in Mpumalanga. It will be commissioned early in the new year, which is another shot in the arm for furniture manufacturers and localisation.
Then there is a question that keeps coming up in my notebooks. We breed, grow and research Eucalyptus, so why don’t we use it more? Three consecutive conferences have now backed that thinking, and together they are shifting the species from a hardwood resource used mainly for mining timber, pulp, paper and woodchips towards structural lumber.
The first was the International Scientific Conference on Hardwood Products (ISCHP26) at Stellenbosch University, where researchers from Stellenbosch and the University of Pretoria explored how to maxx the timber as a possible answer for mass timber construction.
A week later, the University of Pretoria’s Growing Timber Connections Colloquium took up a similar theme. Its technical discussion of hardwoods, SA pine and connections pointed to a pathway for material efficiency. The conference the following day shifted the focus to in-progress and planned construction projects. The takeaway was that SA’s structural timber sector is ready for commercial scale.
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ForSawn Media, the publisher of WoodBiz Africa, has acquired SA Forestry and its related media offerings, effective 1 September 2024. The merger consolidates the efforts of both platforms into a new brand, symbolising our enhanced capacity to serve the forestry and wood products sector.
SA Forestry is an iconic brand and an invaluable voice and record of the development of the forestry industry in Southern Africa. SA Forestry’s long-time editor, Chris Chapman, is the Contributing Editor and part of the team ensuring a seamless transition and continuity in the quality of content you have come to expect.
WoodBiz Africa’s strength lies in its expanding audience of architects, engineers, designers, developers and suppliers in the built environment while serving foresters, sawmillers, wood processors, kitchen, furniture and shopfitting manufacturers, researchers, engineered timber products producers and the woody biomass industry.
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