President & CEO Message

A Message From Dan Fulton:

For any company, the drive for sustainability begins with a strong, profitable business. For Weyerhaeuser, our focus on financial performance has never been more critical as we face a prolonged crisis in our markets amid worldwide economic turmoil.

In the past couple of years we’ve made significant changes to our business portfolio, including the divestiture of our fine paper and containerboard packaging and recycling businesses, and a number of sales and closures in our wood products business. Today, we are tightly focused on Timberlands, our core asset, together with Wood Products and Cellulose Fibers businesses that add value to our Timberlands, and WRECO, our homebuilding subsidiary. We are smaller in size and scope, employing fewer than half the people we did in 2006.

And yet, we have not lost sight of our important sustainability goals.

Notably, in 2008 our employees achieved our long-held safety milestone of a recordable incident rate of less than one. With a year-end RIR of 0.98, we proved that dramatic reduction in workplace injury is possible. At the end of April 2009, our year-to-date RIR was 0.55, demonstrating that more than just achievable, this kind of safety performance is sustainable, too.

We know it’s important to anticipate future markets, so we continue to research energy products, new applications for cellulose, and sustainable forest management techniques. Through our joint venture with Chevron, Catchlight Energy LLC, we are developing technology for converting cellulose-based biomass into economical, low-carbon biofuels. We believe biomass is an essential source of renewable fuel and will satisfy a significant portion of the demand for fossil fuel replacement. Of course, using biomass as an energy source is nothing new to Weyerhaeuser. We use bark, wood residuals, and wood extractives from pulping, to fuel about 75 percent of our manufacturing energy needs. It’s our view that biomass should be a key element of renewable energy strategies in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.

Despite our significant use of energy derived from biomass, we still burn fossil fuels. We are committed to reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from these sources. In 2006, we set a reduction goal of 40 percent from 2000 levels by 2020. By the end of 2008, we had achieved a 10 percent reduction against our baseline, progress that is real, but not on our original trajectory. The goal we set assumed a business portfolio of similar size and scope. Today, our asset base includes far fewer energy intensive manufacturing operations. Both our divestitures and the current weak economy have removed projects from our carbon profile that would have reduced greenhouse gas emissions. We reaffirm our pledge to reduce greenhouse gases, but given this strategic shift in our company structure, we will reevaluate progress toward our original goal at the end of 2009 to determine whether adjustments are needed.

It is the regenerative power of our renewable resource that forms the base of our sustainable business. Growing a tree is a long-term endeavor. Our viability as a company depends on our long-term commitment to continuous improvement in protecting the land, nurturing the forest, supporting the communities where we operate, empowering our employees, tapping their ingenuity to bring useful, innovative products to market, and delivering the financial results to our shareholders.

This portion of our website is your gateway to understanding how we do each of those things and checking on our progress toward long-term sustainability goals. I invite you dive in and learn more.

Dan Fulton
President and CEO Weyerhaeuser Company