Arborite

Arborite is the leading Canadian manufacturer of high-pressure decorative plastic laminates (HPL). Best known as a counter top surfacing material, laminate is a durable decorative veneer applied to cabinetry, furniture, and other horizontal and vertical surfaces. The original Arborite material was developed in 1942 by the Howard Smith Paper Company as an innovative way to utilize waste by-products of the Canadian papermaking industry, and to this day laminate is commonly referred to in Canada by the trade name Arborite.

Laminate is a material made by bonding layers of material or materials. Laminate, in technical terminology, is referred to as High Pressure Laminate (HPL) or even more accurately as High Pressure Decorative Plastic Laminate since there are also industrial high pressure laminates which are not decorative.

The decorative high pressure laminates in our homes and offices, etc. consist of sheets of paper that have been coated or impregnated with two types of resin, stacked on top of each other and placed into a press where they are cooked at a minimum of 265 degrees F. at a pressure of approximately 1,200 pounds per square inch (psi) for about an hour. Under this pressure and heat the resins flow, transforming the stack and the resins into a single sheet of homogenous composite material. "Plastic" laminate is a misleading term because the material is approximately 70% paper and 30% polymer (phenolic and melamine) resin.

The Howard Smith Paper Company was founded in 1912 by C. Howard Smith (1873 – 1931) in an abandoned cotton mill in Beauharnois, Québec, Canada on the shores of Lake St. Louis. By 1914, this one-machine mill was in high production, churning out rag paper. In 1916, Howard Smith acquired the newsprint business of Edwin Crabtree in Crabtree Mills, Quebec, and by 1919, they had also purchased the Toronto Paper Company Limited of Cornwall, Ontario. Over the next 20 years, Howard Smith would acquire an additional four paper companies in various locations across Canada, and expand the operations at each of the facilities.

Howard Smith Paper Company was committed to the conservation of Canada's forests and the sustainability of their source material. In 1937, for their 25th anniversary, the company published a history called "25 Years of Progress"; in it, President Harold Crabtree's mission statement states, "Our aim, primarily, is that of serving the Canadian trade with quality papers at fair prices, conserving the forest wealth of Canada, from which we draw our raw materials, not only to the end that our vast operations may be served for the immediate future, but that future generations, too, may have the same privileges and enjoyment of these forests as ourselves."

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Wikipedia