Some New Westminster industries continue to use the river for transportation, though much less than they once did. Kruger Products (previously Scott Paper) has been a large industrial manufacturer in New West since 1922. Today, Kruger Products is the only tissue mill in all of Western Canada. As neighbouring lumber mills—Alaska Pine and Domans to the east—closed down, Kruger Products expanded onto those sites in the 1980s and 1990s. Kruger Products produces 55-60,000 tonnes of paper a year in New Westminster and distributes finished products as far as Winnipeg and Los Angeles.

Kruger manufactures facial tissue, paper towels, and toilet paper from virgin and recycled pulp. Seaspan regularly delivers 1500 tonne barges of virgin pulp to Kruger from various BC mills. Harvest Power, a New Westminster wood recycler, makes a biofuel (wood by-product) which Kruger uses to generate steam for drying paper and heating the mill. Although both companies are located on the river, the biofuel is delivered by truck.

Next door to Harvest Power in the Braid industrial district, Winvan Paving also uses some recycled materials to produce asphalt for road building. Winvan also installs sidewalks, including all of the sidewalks around the Anvil Centre. The gravel that Winvan mixes into its asphalt and concrete comes by barge from a quarry in Abbotsford.

Will you be disappointed when I tell you that we don't actually use the river that much anymore?
-MARK EVANS, Business Manager, Kruger Products

There's different sources of recycled asphalt products. One source is by-product from manufacturing... Another one is old asphalt that’s on the road. We mill it up, and bring it in. We stockpile these materials, we crush them with an impact crusher, which breaks the matrix, but tries not to fracture the aggregates... and we reintroduce it back into our manufacturing process.
-STAN WEISMILLER, Winvan Paving

Fraser River Pile and Dredge (FRPD) does marine industrial and residential construction. This local business has been here since 1911 and is New Westminster’s oldest surviving industrial firm. FRPD’s main area of expertise is driving piles in water to provide a secure foundation for waterfront buildings, terminals, docks, and bridges. In some ways, the work they do today is very much like the work they have always done, but today it requires greater technical skill and larger equipment. Much of the work involves using a crane on a barge to pound piles (poles) into the riverbed or ocean floor with a drop hammer, or with a newer tool, which vibrates piles into the ground.

Now with some of the sites, the ground is so hard, we've gotten into drilling [to prepare to drive piles]... That’s the new area we’ve gotten into and it's quite interesting. It’s a little more complicated... you're doing this 50, 60 feet in the ground and you have no way of seeing. You run the risk of losing very expensive drill bits in the ground.
-NATE STAFIEJ, Equipment Superintendent, Fraser River Pile and Dredge

You're working off a floating platform, with tides, currents, water levels. Also, marine traffic can go by and cause swells and big problems if you are trying to do some delicate work, fitting some forms, or trying to get something bolted together.
-BILL MCDERMID, Project Manager, Fraser River Pile and Dredge

Just across the river from FRPD is Damco—an import transloading facility in Queensborough, designed specifically for handling containers. Damco opened in 2013 on the site of the former Interfor lumber mill. Damco, like nearly all transloading warehouses in our region, receives containers by truck rather than by barge.

Containers of consumer goods arrive at Deltaport by ship from overseas and are unloaded by longshoremen. From Deltaport, containers are trucked to Damco, where workers unpack marine containers (40’ long), and repack the cargo into domestic containers (53’ long). The domestic containers are then trucked for final distribution as far away as Toronto. The marine containers go back Deltaport, but before that they are often filled at an export transloading warehouse with Canadian pulp, lumber, or grain.

Citizens of the Lower Mainland face a difficult public policy choice: by not using the water to transport containers, dykes are available for recreation, but this comes at the cost of more trucks on the roads. What are your thoughts about using the river for goods movement?