ELGIN — Boise Cascade avoided an all-employee layoff at the Elgin Plywood mill after resolving a woodchip surplus earlier this month.

The company sent a public notice of an impending mill-wide layoff at the Elgin plant on Aug. 16, through a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification. The letter forecasted the layoff to be long-term, starting on or before Oct. 14, but didn’t include any info on why the mill’s operations were to be suspended.

“The reason for (the Elgin plywood plant’s) curtailment was that we couldn’t really find a place to put our woodchips,” Boise Cascade Communications Director Lisa Tschampl said.

Woodchips are a residual fiber leftover from the plywood manufacturing process that the company usually sells to pulp and paper mills in the Pacific Northwest.

After a handful of these mills — including a tissue paper mill in Scappoose owned by Canadian-based Cascade Inc. that shuttered in July — were shut down earlier this year, Elgin Plywood faced a woodchip pileup. In addition to company closures, other pulp and paper mills have switched to using a different type of wood fiber, Tschampl said.

“There was nowhere to place these chips, and you literally just can’t pile them up in your yard forever and a day,” she said.

Tschampl said the plant produces about 50-60 truckloads of woodchips per week. However, she said Boise Cascade was able to find an outlet for the woodchips, and that there should not be any layoffs in October.

Oregon Rapid Response Coordinator Michael Welter said he was notified that Boise Cascade was able to negotiate a new contract to sell their woodchips elsewhere six days after the WARN was sent out.

Welter said companies with greater than 100 employees are required under the WARN Act to submit public announcements of near-future layoffs, and that oftentimes companies issue WARNs preemptively and as a legal precaution in case of the worst scenario that a layoff does occur.

The plywood facility employs about 240 workers, Tschampl said. All of the employees at the mill are represented by the Southwest Mountain States Regional Council of Carpenters.