I was ashtonished to read this today as I design a lot with WA timber:Just 20 per cent of jarrah and 12 per cent of karri harvested from WA’s native forests last financial year ended up as value-added products such as furniture, flooring or structural timber, prompting fresh calls to end what was labelled an unsustainable and unacceptable use of a precious resource.
But reading further it explained it a bit more:
“Because trees are round and knobbly and they’re not neat and square in boards, the recovery from a jarrah tree is never better than around 30 to 32 per cent,” Mr Pearce said. “You could argue that a gold mine only recovers 0.1 per cent of actual gold so 99.9 per cent of the gold mine is dirt dumped into piles so on that basis there is no point having gold mines.”
So there is still a bit of work to do to reach the 30% ending up in value-adding products! Read the article
One of the interesting things the article failed to mention which you alluded to with the goldmines reference, is that what is done with the timber that can't be put into the value adding chain goes into sustainable uses. Woodchips are turned into paper which is recycled and turned into more paper, they are also used for creating activated carbon which can be used for scrubbing pollutants from factories and waterways, and it goes on.
ReplyDeleteI have to love some of the South West environmental types who claim that all logging is bad. See what happens to the environment when all furniture, houses and other constructions are built from concrete or other non-renewable products. It'll be much worse off than the renewable, natural and sustainable timber we're currently using.