SUVA, Fiji Islands (June 14, 2000 - Islands Business/PINA Nius Online)---At
the Pacific Green coconut timber furniture factory, at Cuvu on the western
side of Fiji's main island Viti Levu, they've just scrapped their entire
product line.
No, business is not a disaster. It's a heady success. Bruce Douse, the
company's boss and chief designer, has replaced the old line with an
entirely new one.
The factory, churning out classy tables, chairs and other furnishing that
are sold as fast as they can be produced, is being doubled up in size at its
location near the coast of Viti Levu about 40 kilometers (24 miles) from
Nadi towards Suva, Fiji's capital. The enlarged factory will not simply just
produce more furniture but new products like flooring and panels.
Since opening in 1991 the factory has had its raw material, senile (meaning
70 to 90-year-old) coconut trees delivered by lorries from a strip of land
near Savusavu, on the island of Vanua Levu, Fiji's second largest island. It
consumed about a hundred-acres of old trees a year and, Douse reckons, now
uses about 10 times that amount.
That arrangement will be changed, with trees extracted from a remote coastal
plantation and barged direct to Cuvu so as to avoid the disruption of trips
by an ever-growing number of heavy road vehicles.
Douse says that since every region produces coconut trees with different
qualities in future he wants trees from neighboring Taveuni and from
Kiribati, where the harsher atoll climate produce trees that are older and
harder and are good for making flooring.
Sales are growing by 20% a year, he says. "Australia takes about 50%,
New
Zealand is getting keen, the United States is starting to look good, Korea
is beginning, New Caledonia is strong, French Polynesia is strong and Fiji
is very, very strong."
Bold claim:
"England is happening, but not a lot. Europe could be big but it's too
far
away." The Pacific Green openly makes the bold claim of being the world's
only commercial coconut timber furniture factory.
There are a few more in the world now, but Douse said no one else has caught
up on his company's technology, beginning with techniques for sawing very
dense coconut timber. Conventional saw blades couldn't bite through it
without being worn down at prohibitive rates. The other trick is in drying
the timber so that it isn't cracked by changes of moisture and temperature.
Douse, furniture designer and manufacturer, originally went to Bougainville
to help set up a hardwood furniture factory and shipped some coconut trees
home to Sydney to experiment with them. After five years of development he
opened up shop at Cuvu.
After nearly 10 years he's got recovery (the amount of timber obtained from
a tree) up to 75 percent.
"It took the Kiwis 40 years to have radiata (a timber) really good. We
started with a concept, and we are saying we know a bit about it now. But we
are still learning. We are getting better and better every day. Unless we
improved the technology all the time we would not be in business today.
"We have all sorts of problems we faced and overcame. We're still not
perfect, but our new designs are much more open. It's sewn together so that
when they expand and contract you don't see them."
The thing about a coconut timber factory being in a place like Fiji is that
the supply of old trees is virtually inexhaustible. Coconut plantation
owners hate the cost of felling and disposing of them so, the ups and downs
of the copra business being what it is, they don't.
Douse complains that Fiji is a place that is becoming less competitive to
operate in "every day." Another frustration is developing an efficient
work
force. "We teach people what good workmanship and pride is. But at the
moment they still lose a three-cent screw and it costs you $US 5,000 ($F
10,000). We still suffer from that."
But he still sees the Cuvu location as the place for a very big factory
with, perhaps, a few smaller ones at other locations in the region.
Pacific Islands News Association (PINA)
Website: http://www.pinanius.org
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last revision June 15, 2000