Wednesday 16 December 2009

Fresh and original

The perversity of this being the first and last edition of our new e-newsletter for 2009 is in keeping with where we want it to be: fresh and original. In won’t be landing in your in-box every week, or necessarily even every fortnight. But readers can look forward to in-woodtoday being quite different to any other wood industry newsletter. We sincerely hope you will come to agree – Tony Neilson, editor.

Improving the odds

Don’t be surprised as you mix and mingle over the holiday season if you encounter somebody from the Church of Carbon Absorption (CCA). They will be the ones sidling up to strangers, asking with a nod and a wink if they realise that wood actually stores carbon!

They won’t be bankers trying to make friends by pretending they are almost-interesting nerds. More likely it will be Forest and Wood Products Australia boss Ric Sinclair, or one of his apostles, out there fearlessly spreading the word that Wood is Good – Naturally across a parched and flyblown land (Melbourne).

The campaign might be slightly curtailed because the current PR consultancy is apparently about to be dumped, but the CCA will surely march on and preserve us from the enemy: carbon ignorance.

Despite some 95% of Aussies actually understanding that trees release oxygen and absorb carbon, Sinclair says alarmingly few think the carbon stays in the wood when it is made into something: CO2 is a gas, so presumably it evaporates somewhere when the tree is cut down?

Hopefully he doesn’t go spouting the carbon storage gospel at too many barbies where they are burning charcoal, but Sinclair’s plea at a recent conference for more wood industry people to help spread the good word deserves better than derisive laughter. As he said, increasing demand for wood products requires that existing impediments to its use are reduced. And if a bit of nudge, nudge, wink, wink will improve the odds – why not mention the ‘C’ word to the person next to you.

back to top

Changes on building sites.

Of all the stories we have reported this year, none has generated more interest (monitored traffic through our website) than the prospect that cross-laminated timber (CLT) may soon be available down under in commercial quantities.

Timber Queensland CEO Rod McInnes sees CLT as the possible beginning of a wave of new products and methods that could change the face of construction and make better use of lower grade softwoods.

“The construction industry has got to face up to the fact that 25 Toyota utes parked outside a building site every day with 25 individual tradesmen working away tripping over each other and undoing work some other guy had done because they arrived late, can’t go on. It is not efficient and now there are increasing environmental and safety requirements being imposed … We have to move toward more factory-constructed components so that the site becomes more of an assembly and finishing area,” he told In-Wood.

Meanwhile, at least one Australian importer says CLT will soon be available. Read More

back to top

No 'fast' wood from China

If you are a softwood log exporter or wood panels manufacturer, it’s all about China these days. And if Pöyry Auckland director Marcel Vroege (pictured) has got his intelligence right, fibre supply shortages in the People’s Republic should ensure continuing demand.

“Don’t believe all the talk about massive plantation expansion in China. Yes, there is a lot of planting but only about five percent is fast-growing, and the rest is [for] soil conservation, wind erosion and fruit trees [classified in statistics as ‘plantation’]. A lot of the fast-growing plantings have been put on sites that will never grow fast. They will produce wood eventually, but there will be no sudden and massive increase in wood volumes out of China.”

Meanwhile, the trade in radiata pine logs is setting new records. Read more

back to top

Tortured numbers

American writer Gregg Easterbrook says if you torture numbers they will confess to anything. And when it comes to environmental ‘trust marks’ there is strong evidence that many are being accorded reverence way beyond their actual value in the marketplace. Recent FWPA research claims only 5% of Australian consumers have any awareness or understanding of FSC. But that is still more than double the market recall for the Australian Forestry Standard (AFS) forest certification system. By comparison, 95% of Aussies fully understand the appliance energy rating system.

back to top

In search of legality

Talking of forest certification, DAFF international forest policy manager Philip Townsend – the man responsible for putting together Australia’s new policy on illegal wood – reckons there are 20-plus chain of custody ‘verification’ schemes for wood products operating in the Asia/Pacific region.

“There is a lot of product arriving here that is claimed to be third party audited. And, yes, they are if you take it literally: there is an ‘independent’ company down the road who goes around and ‘audits’ the wood for the exporter, but it has absolutely no accreditation behind the process … But the importer usually won’t know much about the credibility of the paperwork that sits behind those products.”

Can Australia shut the door on illegal wood? Read More

back to top