Plantation woodchips could save forest

In early February 2008, tree grower Great Southern Plantations announced an export deal to Asia of 400,000 tonnes of eucalypt woodchips. This means it will send almost half a million tonnes a year for five years to Hokuetsu Paper Mills in Japan, starting in 2009.

Using estimates from the BRS 2007 hardwood plantation chiplog supply, there should be another 20 similar sized deals by plantation companies over the next seven years. Maybe this is why we are seeing some creative new plans emerging by the forest destruction camp on how else to exploit native forests. One loopie idea is to chip them up, mush them down and make ethanol fuel from them. You could even call that a ‘closed loopie’ idea; using the forests to fuel the machines to log the forests (eeuur – sorry).

Jill