What's The Big Idea?

I’m working on a book.  Hopefully the thing will be available in both hard cover and electronic versions sometime next month.

The title of the book will be:  Environmentally Sustainable Lumber, A Renewable Resource. 

There’s a subtitle too:  Five Ways You Can Improve The Environment, Support Small Business and Save Yourself A Hunk of Money.

The book will deal with thin kerf, band sawmills and their ability to provide for huge environmental enhancements, economic opportunity for one and two person businesses and, consumer benefits in the form of reduced cost and the ability to purchase lumber made from material that would have been, in the past, made into firewood or simply left in the woods to rot and emit the carbon it contains into the atmosphere.

Kerf is the thickness of the cut a sawmill blade makes as it moves through a piece of wood to make lumber.  Thinner kerfs equal less sawdust and more lumber.  It’s as simple as that.

The modern thin kerf sawmill is capable of producing as much as 30% more lumber out of a log than more conventional mills are able to achieve.  Modern thin kerf sawmills also mill high value lumber out of trees and tree parts conventional mills will not accept.  Before the advent of thin kerf mills over the past thirty years or so that wood was called “waste.”  Now it is a resource.



Thin kerf means more lumber and less sawdust from the resource



The point today is this.  All too often the “pop-environmental” end of the environmental movement focuses on some “BIG ISSUE” with demands that more laws, more enforcement and more intrusion into people’s lives be imposed on the public while ignoring simple ways to make very large differences benefitting all aspects of society with few downsides.

Consider:

The major manufacturer of thin kerf sawmills in the world is a company called Wood-Mizer Products.  The firm is based in Indianapolis, Indiana.

According to Wood-Mizer, more than 50,000 sawmills have been sold by the firm over the years.  A number of other firms complete with Wood-Mizer so, based on some research recently accomplished at Auburn University, possibly 100,000 sawmills are being operated world-wide, mostly by smallish firms milling anything from a few thousand board feet per year to, in the case of those using Wood-Mizer’s industrial sawmills, a few million board feet of lumber per year. 

In total those sawmills produce billions of board feet of lumber per year, much of it from trees and tree parts that would otherwise be turned into firewood or left to rot or burn in the forests, releasing their greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere as they deteriorate.

Thin kerf sawmills, like those built by Wood-Mizer and others, have been shown to operate, in some situations, at a near 70% recovery efficiency, compared to only 50% a traditional mill might achieve.

Some years ago a USDA Forest Service analysis by Stephen Bratkovich reported that “The US annual cut of timber for lumber products is equivalent to approximately 240 million trees. However, if our sawmills operated at a 70% recovery efficiency, we could get our annual harvest of lumber from 171 million trees. Thus, we could save the equivalent of 69 million trees annully if our recovery effiency improved from 50% to 70% in our primary processing industry. In addition, these same 69 million trees, if permitted to grow in the forest, would continue to absorb about 900,000 tons of carbon dioxide and produce about 650,000 tons of oxygen each year.”

In the past this would have been  firewood... thin kerf means it can be processed into valuable lumber

Bratkovich continued by pointing out that, “On a more local level, thin kerf sawing which results in improved recovery efficiencies will enable the use of lower quality and/or smaller diameter logs which otherwise may have little or no economic value. Consequently our forest management could be stimulated which will improve (and expand) the resource base and lead to more successful rural development efforts in retaining, expanding, and attracting wood-using industries,” and, “Thin kerf sawing that increases lumber recovery and simultaneously reduces waste has the added potential benefit of keeping some sawmills profitable and in-business. In effect, the adoption of thin kerf technologies can save jobs by enabling mills to continue to operate.”

Today, thin kerf sawmills capable of the efficiencies being discussed by Bratkovich are being operated by small scale entrepreneurs in or near almost every city and/or county in the nation. 

So the question of the day is, “Why wouldn’t anyone seriously interested in environmental enhancements actively seek out lumber producers who have a hand in helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere amounting to hundreds of thousands of tons of gasses per year when lumber is needed?”

In part, the answer is lack of knowledge but, there is something more.  A march to demand a new law or stop a project of some kind or another is collegial, fun, exciting and satisfying.  Buying a piece of lumber from the owner of a small sawmill rather than simply dropping by the big box store may be far more environmentally significant but, much less exciting.

Maybe anyone considering themselves to be an environmentalist ought to think about the implications of that in terms of actually preserving and enhancing the earth’s environment.

 

Re-creating What Never Existed

Milling lumber from dead trees replaces harvest of living trees

A "top five" reason we all spend so much time talking about improving the environment and so little time actually doing something to positively enhance the environment is our seemingly endless desire, especially in North America but, elsewhere as well, to re-create an environment that never existed.

In coming months I will blog on this issue, and others, especially addressing why so many of the “pro-environmental” initiatives we insist our governments undertake on our behalf end up, usually unintentionally, harming the environment. 

As just two examples of how misinformed approaches to resolving environmental issues bring social, economic and environmental harm consider: 

·       Early accounts of the ponderosa pine forests dominating large areas of the West report a horse and wagon could be driven for long distances through the original forest without the need for a road.

·       In my own neck of the woods, a 1945 report on farming reports that 51% of the farms in Whatcom County were 29 or fewer acres in size; 21% were 9 acres or smaller.

In an effort re-create a non-existent past the pop-environmental industry has tried to;

·       Stop thinning and/or logging of overcrowded forests in the pine forests of the west and, locally, in places like my own county in Washington has;

·        Fought to zone large areas of the county to allow no smaller than 40 acre lots in a misguided effort to “preserve farmland.”  Potential farms smaller than 40 acres are denigrated as being “residential lots.” 

The result has been severe existing and potential impacts as these misguided approaches to planning for environmental enhancements bring about;  

·       Massive fires and millions of acres of dead forests kill as the result of insect and plan infestations in the west, emitting thousands of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere each year and;

·       On the local scale in places like Whatcom County, a possible end, or at least a constriction of the potential, to engage in profitable small acreage farming (organic and specialty crops especially); exactly the kind of farming representing, according to USDA research (I’ll discuss those studies in the future), the future of sustainable farming in and near metropolitan areas.  Why?  Land becomes too expensive to engage in family scale farming in part due to artificially high prices for small acreages and artificially low values for larger acreages.

Attempts to create static and artificial environments with little attention to reality almost never  result in actual environmental enhancements.  The natural environment is never static.  Species come and go, weather runs hot and cold and the landscape changes.  Misguided approaches to resolving environmental issues, especially approaches attempting to re-create what never existed in the first place almost always limit creativity and result in the unintended consequence of serious environmental degradation in terms of what we believe we wish to preserve. 

In the future this space will contain blogs about the issues discussed above as well as commentary on dozens of other ways we “play” the environment for political or financial gain rather than for environmental enhancement.  A special focus will be on what I call “entrepreneurial environmentalism” or, the investigation of ways in which private enterprise can address environmental enhancement yet still remain profitable.  It is a fact of life that while nearly everyone professes a great love of the environment, few will actually invest a dime, strictly in the name of environmental improvement, in products or approaches likely to actually lead to enhancements.


To the extent that businesses can bring products and approaches to the market that both enhance the environment and demonstrate cost effectiveness to the customer, the environment is improved as a natural consequence of the marketplace in action.