U.S. Wood-Using Mill Locations - 2005

Jeffrey Prestemon, John Pye, James Barbour, Gerald R. Smith, Peter Ince, Carolyn Steppleton, and Weihuan Xu

map of continental U.S. showing location of mills

Purpose

These data were assembled as part of a study of the likely economic impacts of biomass removals to mitigate wildfire damages, termed the "EBR" or "Economics of Biomass Removals" study. The study spans the continental United States and requires matching areas needing fuels treatment with nearby wood-using mills. The mill location data here update and expand the spatial scope of several earlier datasets made available on this web site: the Mill Locations Eastwide 1999 dataset based on data from the late 1990's, the Southern Chip Mills 1998 dataset and the Southern Chip Mills 2000 dataset.

Although collected to address our own research needs, it is anticipated that the maps and datasets offered here will prove useful in a variety of tasks: landowners and loggers seeking nearby mills to market their logs, businesses looking for manufacturers of pulp, lumber, and other wood products, or analysts looking to relate mill locations to forest conditions.

The bottom of this page contains links to download this most-recent dataset. Also there are links to formal metadata files. This page offers a less formal description of the data, where they came from, and how they should be interpreted.

Source and Scope

This dataset is based on information collected by mill data managers in Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Units as well as collaborators in the Texas Forest Service, the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL), and the Focused Science Delivery Program of the Pacific Northwest Research Station (details below). Together the data describe wood-demanding mills of the continental United States. Because our interest was in locations which might purchase logs, we restricted our data to primary wood processors. That means we only included mills that purchase logs or chips and excluded secondary processors of wood, such as paper mills that buy market pulp or rely entirely on recycled fiber.

Mill data managers rely heavily on data reported by the various states. Because data reporting criteria vary by state, state-by-state comparisons should be approached with caution. For example, Mississippi reports sawmills down to 100 thousand board feet (mbf) while Florida tracks sawmills down to 50 mbf capacity. Texas has no size limit on the mills it reports.

Mill Data Manager	Data Provided	Email
Carolyn Steppleton	Southern mills	email Carolyn
Weihuan Xu	Texas mills	email Weihuan
Gerald R. Smith	Western mills	email Gerald
Ron McRoberts	North Central mills	email Ron
Bruce Hansen	Northeastern mills	email Bruce
Peter Ince	pulp mills from all regions	email Peter

Data Currency

These data were collected from different sources, each with their own currentness. Data on pulp mills across the continental United States were based on best available information as of February 2005. Data on other mills in Western states and in Texas were collected in 2004. Data on other mills from the remaining Southern states were collected from 1999 to 2001. Mill data for northern and north central states have thus far not been updated since our previous 2000 dataset, so mill data in these states are derived from data collected between 1994 and 1998. However, data for pulp mills in this and all the other regions were updated based on an FPL survey conducted in 2000. Some mills may have closed or idled, relocated, or changed their name or address since their information was collected. For pulp mills some effort was made to update their name, address and operational status as of 2005. This was not undertaken for other mill types.

Geolocation

Collaborators provided information on mill type, name, and address to J. Prestemon and J. Pye in the research unit "Economics of Forest Protection and Management." To map the locations of the mills, they employed the geocoding services of Tele Atlas North America, formerly ETAK, Inc. The service estimated latitude and longitude for each mill and provided the county FIPS code and Census tract and block identifiers corresponding to that location. Coordinate information was input into ArcGIS to create a GIS coverage and other derivative products.

When mapped, multiple mills can occur at exactly the same place. In this case only one of the mills may be visible. This is particularly the case when mill addresses only offer Post Office Box numbers, a common procedure. If the geocoding service could not identify an actual street address, it provided a location based on the zipcode. Thus all mill addresses reporting Post Office box numbers in the same zipcode will have identical locations. Users are encouraged to check the tabular information (for example, the dBase file) for the complete information.

On the other hand, a given company may operate diverse processing equipment from a single location. If they purchase timber at a single location under one company name, they will likely be listed as a single mill.

Records and Fields

The ArcGIS coverages and shapefiles represent each mill as a point. Detailed information on each mill is available in the dBase IV files. Each record in a data file corresponds to one mill. Record numbers created for each mill ("mill-id") uniquely identify the mill in this dataset. No effort has been made to match mill-id's across survey years. Name changes, openings, and closings would make such an effort difficult and error prone.

Records also contain an identifier for the source which provided it. The included location data represent information on thousands of mills from the continental United States. Errors can arise from different sources including errors in mailing addresses and in geocoding. While we have tried to minimize our own procedural errors and corrrect a few of the more obvious errors from other sources, there are doubtless errors still remaining in some of the records, over and above the imprecisions inherent in geocoding in general and on accepting Post Office Box addresses in particular.

The GIS coverages and ArcView shapefiles automatically include several GIS-standard variables describing shape, perimeter, and internal record ID, but these are of limited use in a point coverage. More generally useful are the remaining variables. Each mill has one row of data, and each row in the dBase file contains seventeen variables (text and numerical). In order, the fields in the table and shapefiles are:

MILL-ID

Assigned by J. Prestemon, a unique identifier of each mill and survey combination. The number is not repeated in this, earlier, or subsequent surveys.

LON, LAT

This is our best estimate of the mill longitude and latitude, respectively. The best estimates of longitude and latitude were GPS coordinates from Missouri, where state officials have reportedly provided the North Central Research Station with GPS coordinates. The next best coordinates, with one exception, were obtained by submitting mill address information to Tele Atlas N.A. The quality of the latitude and longitude data when evaluated by Tele Atlas can be judged by MAT_TYPE, explained below. Finally, the exception to the Tele Atlas results was for the North Central Station’s mills. In most cases in that Station, their FIA Unit provided latitude and longitude coordinates to J. Prestemon and J. Pye. These coordinates were those of the town nearest the mill. In cases where Tele Atlas match codes were higher than 3, the North Central Station's estimate of the mill latitude and longitude was taken as the best estimate of the mill's location. These are the locations provided in the accompanying data set.

REGION_ID

Identifiers of who supplied the mill address data. Note that some mills identified as originating from one region were actually located in another region. This occurred where the physical locations of mills were different from the company headquarters of the mill. Regions and their included states are as follows:

1=Northeast: CT, DE, ME, MD, MA, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, VT, WV
2=Southern:AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, OK, SC, TN, VA
3=Texas: TX
4=North Central: IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, SD, WI
5=West: AZ, CA, CO, ID, KS, MT, ND, NE, NV, NM, OR, SD, UT, WA, WY

NAME

Name of the forest products business.

TYPE_NEW

Kind of mill, recategorizations based on identifiers provided by the five sources. Six types were identified:

Sawmill: hardwood and softwood sawmills, pallet mills
Composite: particle board mills, chip mills, OSB, MDF, other composite board mills
PlyVen: hardwood and softwood veneer and plywood mills
PostPole: post, pole, and piling mills
Pulpmill: pulpmills
Other: firewood, bark products (Texas only), charcoal, and a few miscellaneous wood-using facilities

TOWN

The town corresponding to the mailing address of the physical location of the mill

STATE

The state corresponding to the mailing address of the physical location of the mill

MAT_ZIP

The zipcode corresponding to the mailing address of the physical location of the mill

MAT_TYPE

Indicates quality of location information provided by Tele Atlas. Codes include:

Code	Type	Description
0	Non-match	Address could not be matched to any Tele Atlas database. In limited cases coordinates were obtained from other sources; otherwise none are provided.
1	Block Face	Street segment exact address match. Generally means the best location information, within a city block.
2	Near match	Address matched to a single street segment, but the exact address number was not found.
3	Zip+2 Centroid	A point representing the aggregate of all geocoded ZIP+4's for the ZIP+2 of the input address.
4	5-Digit ZIP Centroid	A point representing the aggregate of all geocoded ZIP+4's for the 5-digit ZIP of the input address.
5	3-Digit ZIP (SCF) Centroid	A point representing the aggregate of all geocoded ZIP+4's for the 3-digit ZIP of the input address.
6	Ambiguous match	Address matched to more than one street segment, a centroid of all segments is returned. This represents the worst quality locational information.

FIPS_CODE

The format of this code is SSCCC, where SS refers to the state FIPS code and CCC refers to the county FIPS code (look up county names here)

CEN_TRACT

This is the census tract code provided by Tele Atlas when the mill address was geocoded. Poor location information may have precluded assigning a census tract, this was particularly true for MAT_TYPE 5. The CEN_TRACT code begins with a two-character state abbreviation and is followed by:

a three-digit county FIPS code,
a four-digit census tract code (for which many detailed census data are available)
a two-digit street segment code, which further refines the census tract (combined with the four-digit tract code, the two-digit segment code provides the finest level of disaggregation of U.S. census data)

STREET

The mailing street or P.O. Box or rural route of the physical location of the mill.

PRECISE_TY

The reporting agency’s classifier of the mill type. Contact the corresponding mill data manager for the code definitions if their meaning is unclear.

FIA_SURVEY

The year that the mill address information was collected. It varies by state.

STATUS

The operational status of the mill when checked in 2005. For most mills this is left blank, indicating we did not investigate the status. When reported, "open" indicates it was operating, "closed" indicates at the time checked it was closed. Closed mills are listed in the datasets but do not appear in the images offered below.

FRMRNAME

Former name for this mill, if known.

CAP_1961 through DEFEXP2000

Pulping capacity data (mill2005p dataset only); Data obtained from:
Smith, Brett R., Robert W. Rice, and Peter J. Ince. 2000. Pulp capacity in the United States, 2000. USDA Forest Service General Technical Report FPL-139. 23 pages. No data on mill production capacity are reported for any other mill type in our datasets. Production capacity of individual softwood sawmills is available in Spelter and Alderman (2005).

File Formats

The mill locations are provided in both spatial and tabular formats. The two spatial formats are ArcGIS (uncompressed) Export coverage and ArcView shapefiles stored in a zip format archive, both unprojected ("geographic projection"). Offered tabular formats are dBase IV and Excel, readable by most database and spreadsheet programs. See our Downloading and Using Data page for suggestions on how to use these different file types.

Download Options:

Scope of dataset	ArcGIS Export/ Shapefile Zip	Database/ Spreadsheet	Metadata
Southern U.S.	mill2005s.e00 635K mill2005s.zip 144K	mill2005s.dbf 1.2M mill2005s.xls 738K	mill2005s.htm
Texas	mill2005t.e00 109K mill2005t.zip 18K	mill2005t.dbf 66K mill2005t.xls 69K	mill2005t.htm
Western U.S.	mill2005w.e00 313K mill2005w.zip 51K	mill2005w.dbf 220K mill2005w.xls 205K	mill2005w.htm
North Central U.S.	mills_nc.e00 1.0M mills_nc.zip 130K	mills_nc.dbf 597K mills_nc.xls 525K	mills_nc.htm
Northeastern U.S.	mills_ne.e00 1.8M mills_ne.zip 211K	mills_ne.dbf 1.1M mills_ne.xls 965K	mills_ne.htm
Pulpmills, Continental U.S.	mill2005p.e00 158K mill2005p.zip 27K	mill2005p.dbf 102K mill2005p.xls 101K	mill2005p.htm

Related Resources:

modified: 11-FEB-2008
created by: John M. Pye

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