Advantage Trim & Lumber Company’s vice president, Betty Pelc, has just announced the purchase of a new sawmill in Brazil, located just a few miles up the river from the company’s existing kiln-drying and processing plant.

The company’s new sawmill will be named Lumber Queens. Betty stated, “I chose the name to highlight and honor the rapidly rising role of women in our company and the industry. For centuries, the industry has been dominated by men, and for the most part they have done a fine job, but I think women have some long-overlooked ideas for production, distribution, treatment of workers, and ecology that surely will change the way things get done.”

The facility will be overseen by the company’s South American division director Viviane Peixoto, and exports will be handled by the company’s US-based import/export manager Vanessa Carrano. Betty Pelc added, “We are building a power team, it happens to contain a lot of women, and a lot of things are going to change in exciting ways.”

The new facility houses two separate sawmill lines that will process a combined 34,000 board feet of hardwood lumber per shift. There’s a port for receiving barges carrying up to 850,000 board feet of logs at a time. The grounds will include a 10-acre log yard that will stockpile up to 3 million board feet of logs, allowing production to continue throughout the rainy season.

The rough-sawing facility will employ 40 local workers in addition to the 120 employees at the company’s existing kiln-drying and finish mill. Advantage will also hire additional support staff in their US corporate office for handling the new sales and administration duties.

The company is working to obtain FSC certification for its new sawmill. This will complement the existing certification for all of Advantage’s other facilities.

The new sawmill will provide rough blanks for processing at the company’s kiln-drying facility, where it produces exotic decking, deck tiles, hardwood flooring, beams, live-edge slabs, turning blanks, industrial lumber, cabinet-grade hardwoods, and other FSC certified wood products. All of the material processed at the facility is responsibly harvested from well-managed forests. Advantage works with hundreds of species. At this new facility, the company will process:

    Jatoba (Brazilian Cherry)     Ipe     Cumaru     Massaranduba     Angelim     Lacewood     Bloodwood     Purpleheart     Tigerwood     Garapa     Andiroba     Taurai     Tatajuba     Itauba     Quaruba     Cambara     And several other lesser-known species

For stabilizing and drying this vast array of hardwoods, the company uses a combination of 15 different high-tech vacuum kilns, dehumidification kilns, and traditional steam kilns with a drying capacity of more than 600,000 board feet.

Advantage Trim & Lumber is the fastest-growing supplier of sustainably harvested hardwood decking, flooring, and lumber, and was one of the first to sell wood products online. AdvantageLumber.com ships both job lots and full containers directly to job sites throughout the nation and the world. Advantage has more than 680,000 square feet of company-owned manufacturing space with facilities in Buffalo, NY; Grover, NC; Santa Fe Springs, CA; Sarasota, FL; and Belem, Brazil. It has just completed an extensive overhaul of its existing Brazilian facility and launched one of the world’s largest urban log recycling programs at its Florida facility. The company continues to implement aggressive expansion plans, and has reported double-digit growth every year since its inception. Advantage is currently scouting sites for future locations in North America and Europe, and is considering various acquisitions of existing companies.

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