An Easy And Profitable Way To Reduce Greenhouse Gasses

The article following appeared in one of the world's major forest products industry magazines last year.  Headquartered in India, Wood News serves an area containing about half the world's population.  It was an honor to have them publish one of my articles.

Thin kerf sawmilling has been addressed on this blog before but, it is worth addressing again because using a thinner sawblade to mill lumber from a log can lead to 30% more lumber out of a log meaning 30% more carbon is locked up for decades, or even centuries.

Thin kerf sawmilling is also one of the world's best examples of how a very simple technology, mostly operated by everyday working people, can make a huge environmental difference, support sustainability, and enhance local economies.

Anyone purchasing lumber not sawn on a thin kerf sawmill, if the thin kerf is available ( most commonly search for portable sawmills) is contributing to encreased carbon releases to the atmosphere.

Very thin kerf means more lumber and that means less harvest

And so, the article:

THIN KERF SAWMILLING CAN DRIVE ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENHANCEMENTS

Growing awareness of the important part a strong forest products industry plays in assuring individuals, companies, communities and nations can achieve healthy forest, climate change and economic goals has begun to impact policy decisions by local, regional and national governments around the world.  In India, the importance of the industry in achieving environmental and economic goals comes because growing and healthy forests scrub carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it (store carbon in isolation) until the wood deteriorates.  When trees are converted to lumber, the carbon remains sequestered, often for decades or even for hundreds of years.  Also important, recent advances in processing technology have brought huge improvements in the amount of lumber recovered from the resource as well as dramatically reduced equipment costs.  More recovery and reduced equipment cost is key to the growth of the industry both in terms of competitiveness and, in terms of entry costs, especially in disadvantaged areas. 

Carbon Sequestration

The growing awareness of the part the forest products industry can play in environmental enhancement was highlighted recently (2011) when U. S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced his agency would begin to promote wood “…as a primary building material in green building.” 

The basis of Vilsack’s decision was a U. S. Forest Service Study, Science Supporting the Economic and Environmental Benefits of Using Wood and Wood Products in Green Building Construction.  The study includes an extensive review of the scientific literature on wood as a construction material.  The review led to a conclusion that using wood in building products yields fewer greenhouse gases than the use of other common building materials does.  “This study confirms what many environmental scientists have been saying for years,” Vilsack said.  “Wood should be a major component of American building and energy design.”

From the perspective of a researcher producing the study, David Cleaves, U.S. Forest Service Climate Change Advisor said, “The argument that somehow non-wood construction materials are ultimately better for carbon emissions than wood products is not supported by our research.  Trees removed in an environmentally responsible way allow forests to continue to sequester carbon through new forest growth.  Wood products continue to benefit the environment by storing carbon long after the building has been constructed.”

India’s  Potential For Increasing Carbon Sequestration

The carbon sequestration potential of a healthy forest is considerable and the findings of U.S. studies are as relevant to India as they are elsewhere.  Addressing just one sector of the forest landscape, a 2007 United Nations analysis of India’s forests commented, “Policies that promote agroforestry will help to increase the carbon density of sites relative to traditional agriculture, thereby providing climate change mitigation benefits. Carbon sequestration in Indian agroforests varies from 19.56 tonnes of carbon/hectare/year in Uttar Pradesh to a carbon pool of 23.46 to 47.36 tonnes carbon/hectare/year above- and belowground in the tree-bearing arid agro-ecosystems of Rajasthan. The average sequestration potential in agroforestry has been estimated to be 25 tonnes carbon/hectare/year over 96 million hectares of land in India.”

Agroforestry can be defined as being everything from plantation forests to approaches designed to grow trees and other crops simultaneously on the same land with the two interspersed.  A healthy forest products industry is required to realize, and even enhance, sequestration through agroforestry.   If trees are grown as a crop, a market for the crop must exist to assure an incentive for the growing of the crop.  The highest and best use for logs, as well as the most profitable, is processing of the fiber into salable products.  Nevertheless,  much of the wood  harvested in India is underutilized.  The United Nations analysis estimates 85% of the  roundwood grown in India is consumed as fuel.  At the same time the analysis points to a supply shortage in the country, a clear indication that considerable room for industry growth exists in the nation. 

New Technologies Reduce Costs, Reduce The Need For Imports And Increase Carbon Sequestration

New technologies have greatly improved the ability of the Indian forest product industry to seize the opportunity a supply shortage represents.  In particular, the rise of thin kerf band sawmills as an important part of the industry creates opportunity across the broad spectrum of the industry.

Kerf is the thickness of the cut a blade makes when processing a log.  A comparatively  thick blade like that utilized in conventional sawmills can operate at speed but, considerably more log is turned into sawdust compared to the thin kerf band mill.  Improvements in blade technology by the manufacturers of thin kerf sawmills have allowed for mills capable of industrial levels of production even as yield from a set amount of fiber is increased by as much as 30% when compared to traditional technologies.

First introduced to the broader marketplace by Wood-Mizer Products, Incorporated of Indianapolis, Indiana nearly thirty years ago, the thin kerf portable sawmill and, more recently, industrial versions of the mill have revolutionized the industry.  Today, according to Wood-Mizer, more than 50,000 of their mills are in operation world-wide as are thousands of additional mills manufactured by companies competing with Wood-Mizer.

The efficiency and environmental benefits thin-kerf sawmilling provide was pointed to in a U.S. Forest Service study some years ago.  According to the author, “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 annually if our recovery efficiency 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.”

Increasing use of thin kerf technology will positively impact the Indian forest products industry in four significant ways.  They include:

Environmental Enhancements Through Increased Carbon Sequestration

A 2002 article in the Forest Products Journal, a science oriented publication, cited studies on Russian sawmills concluding, “Through milling improvements that increase the sawmill lumber recovery from 68.3 to 80.0 percent the conversion of carbon from the tree to marketable lumber can increase from 38.9 to approximately 45.6 percent.”  More wood converted to lumber means more carbon continues to be stored in the wood.

Enhanced Use Of The National Resource

Thin kerf sawmills like those produced by Wood-Mizer not only provide substantial yield increases from an existing resource, they allow the use of tree parts and other materials that cannot be efficiently sawn by conventional technologies.  At a recent conference focusing on urban forestry this attribute was strikingly demonstrated when a tree branch only a meter or so in length was stumbled across by a spectator in the nearby brush then milled on a Wood-Mizer to produce strikingly beautiful wood suitable for use as furniture or art wood. 

Thin kerf sawmilling allows wood currently considered to be usable only for fuel wood by conventional mills to be converted into valuable lumber when processed on a band saw mill.

Greater Yield From Log Imports Means More Profit Per Log And Less Need To Purchase

The positive implications on the need to import wood to fill India’s appetite for wood products are obvious if yield from a given resource can be increased by 20 – 30%.  Profit per log for the processor increases even as the outflow of capital from the nation is reduced.

Enhanced Access To The Industry Due To Increased Profitability And Reduced Costs

Small thin kerf sawmills can be purchased for a fraction the cost of conventional sawmills.  Studies done at Auburn University in the United States point to the ability the mills provide to cooperative ventures, small scale enterprises and others to enter the marketplace.  A significant majority of the 50,000 mills Wood-Mizer has sold over the years have resulted in the formation of thousands of family businesses. 

Conclusions:

Population increases leading to supply shortages, a significant opportunity to make use of currently underutilized fiber to produce high quality products and the opportunities afforded by new technologies lead to the inescapable conclusion that the Indian forest products industry is on the cusp of substantial growth.  The beneficiaries will include industry participants as well as the people of the nation as a whole.

Optimizing yield from the resource is especially important in countries like India where the resource is limited compared to demand.  Because thin kerf sawmills are capable of significantly increasing yield from a log they represent one of the most important innovations seen by the industry in recent years.