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Just wondering if anybody has been out to the tarkine wilderness in tas to see for themselves what is going on down there. The way I hear it a tonne of pink myrtle can make either $10 worth of woodchips, $5000 worth of sawn timber or $30,000 worth of veneer. Put another way we can produce $100m. of woodchips per year for the next twenty years or so and then it is all over or we can produce $100m. of value added timber product per year for ever while employing five times as many people...
Haven't been to Tassie but I live right next door to one of the biggest chipmills in Australia (if not the biggest) which is located in Twofold Bay at Eden. I've also seen what they do to the forests around here.
You might be right on the $10 per tonne, I couldn't say, but I guess the economic rationale is that of the $5000 worth of timber or the $30,000 worth of veneer, what percentage is absorbed by production costs? Making woodchips is dirt cheap, hence the dirt cheap price. Plus the Japs lap the stuff up and it's good for the trade deficit.
The worst part about it is that logging for sawn timber requires being a bit selective about what you cut down. Anything under a certain size is no good. For woodchip, they use anything and everything. There's little incentive to leave anything standing at all. Fortunately, a lot of the bush around here is now National Park, which is not without it's problems by the way, but at least they can't cut it all down.
I know an ex manager of APM who worked for them some 20-30 years back and he said you would cry to see what they did to the forests in Tassie.
100 plus year old trees into the chipper and 10 minutes later lots of chips.
So its been going on for a long time now.
I have a free video at home that Timbercorp produced on there plantation chipping process. Four people produce hundreds of tonnes of chips per day, its amazing to watch this video. Worth getting a copy if you have not seen the process.
Daniel
I agree with the general emotive sentiments about chipping good trees but can anyone suggest what to make toilet paper from if chipping is banned.
echnidna
Plantation timber should be used for paper products not Native forests.
Daniel
The best solution for this is to use Hemp. It grows very fast, uses little water and actually improves the soil. It also is an excellent alternative to cotton. Sadly, governments seem to refuse to encourage the use of hemp because cannabis is illegal and not a vote winner. If they grew this up in the Murry/Darling basin instead of the river systems would begin to recover.
Grunt, I am with you on that one, don't see why they can't grow hemp under controlled conditions like they do for opium poppies in Tassie. Seem to recall hearing somewhere that the forestry industry in America killed off the hemp growing industry a fair while ago to save their jobs, but don't quote me on that.
Cheers
Barry
The whole reason Canabis became illegal in America in the 1930's was because the Cotton growers were concerned about the Hemp taking over. BTW, the Canabis they grow for fibres has little of the active ingredient (THC).
I have some really nice hemp clothes. Down thru the centuries hemp has been used for more than just wiping your . it can be used for rope, furniture, clothes, smoking(?), paper, etc etc...
What Grunt said is right - not sure of the species but cannibis sativa and cannibis indica are similar (I think) and only one of them (I think) will get you out of it -stoned that is... (i think) if im wrong there must be another strain that is used for either smoking or clothing. so just make the harmless ones legal and off you go. also the males of the plant has less THC content so why not just graft males for cultivation ? bloody shortsightedness!!!
Whenever I fly over central australia and see the salination and dead murry river red gums I almost tear over from seeing the desolation. we should be f*kin ashamed of ourselves. theres gotta be a way to save ourselves from ourselves before australia is a salted desert end to end. I do like a nice salad but this is rediculious.