In October last year, a group of timber workers started a lobby group called Loggers for Forests. The group wants to stop woodchipping in old growth forests and to use trees taken from forests more efficiently. Mick Harris is a timber contractor from Fernbank in East Gippsland and he says most loggers think woodchipping is …
The Exclusive Brethren’s manipulation of election campaigns has been a major influence in politics. Now it’s been revealed how companies infiltrate the political sphere to direct major decisions in their favour. Multinational packaging company Amcor who owned the PaperlinX woodchip and paper mill in the Latrobe Valley, were involved in corporate spying on green groups …
Japanese paper factories are now demanding their woodchips come from trees that are less than 15 years old , either from plantations or young regrowth, rather than natural forests. This has caused the recent 40% drop in woodchip sales from Tasmania’s forests. Regrowth please In East Gippsland there’s been a substantial increase in chipping young …
A December 2005 truck-check vigil at the Eden woodchip mill showed that over 2/3rds of logs that entered the Nippon woodchip mill at Eden were large, meaning they are from mature and old growth forests. Of the 158 trucks that arrived between 4am and 7pm on just one day, 75% came from the south (the …
There could be even darker hidey-holes for political donations if John Howard’s gang gets its proposed electoral changes through. It will allow anonymous donations of up to $10,000. This means that each state, territory and federal branch of a political party could receive $10,000 each, totalling $90,000 all up – and all in total secrecy. …
The agriculture and economics bureau that crunches numbers and writes reports on Australian industries (ABARE) says that exports of woodchips rose in the last financial year. However they don’t differentiate between native forests and plantation woodchips. They didn’t say that more than 1.5 million tonnes, of the nearly 9 million tonnes of hardwood woodchip exported, …
Despite the discovery that Bass Strait’s water flushes once every six months, Gunns is still assuring us it is safe to release millions of litres of their pulp mill effluent into the ocean. Gunns’ chairman, John Gay, says the effluent is not a pollutant. “The area has got a water flow fast enough and strong …
Bob Humphries, owner of the big Cann River sawmill, is sore over new prices for logs and wants the government to reduce royalty prices to below cost price . He says demand for native forest timber is falling and they can’t get as much for sawn timber any more. After decades of receiving welfare in …
The largest paper mill in Australia is based in Gippsland and is planning to expand – with the government’s full blessing and financial assistance. It will need an additional 200,000 m3 of eucalypt pulpwood. But where will it come from? PaperlinX, maker of Reflex copy paper, was formally known as APM, Amcor and is now …
After Mitsubishi announced it was considering not buying chips from old growth forests, Nippon (the company that buys East Gippsland’s woodchips) announced it was also reviewing its policy on taking old growth woodchips. Tasmania’s logging industry group, FIAT, claims that Mitsubishi had been “influenced by the economic vandalism and treachery of extremist environmental groups”. Old …
