TIMBER - THE ULTIMATE SUSTAINABLE BUILDING MATERIAL?

Sustainable Logging

Using the statistic from earlier quoted Waitakere City's Sustainable Home Guidelines, (without knowing the exact numbers of trees per acre in New Zealand as compared to US) "Each year an acre of healthy growing forest produces up to 7 tons of new wood, releases about 8 tons of fresh oxygen, and consumes about 10 tons of carbon dioxide." Coordinating that with the best information we could find to date, (US Forest Service estimates by David B. McKeever, research forester, Forest Products Laboratory, Madison WI,) a 1977 trees per acre count and a 1996 timber product use in a 2,190 square foot house: Each conventional 2,190 square foot conventional wood frame house requires 27.3 trees and destroys 2.9 acres of forest. Therefore, annually, this wipes out 23.2 tons of fresh oxygen from being produced and prevents 29 tons of CO2 from being consumed! If you consider it may take 15+ years for the forest to grow back to healthy state for comparative numbers, by using a multiple of only 10 years means for every HeartCraft AAC House built, a minimum 232 tons of fresh oxygen is produced and 290 tons of CO2 is removed from the atmosphere! The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) noted that the Census Department numbers confirm that new home sales hit a record one year high of 906,000 units - up from what had already been reported as a record 900,000 units - in 2001. The numbers are down for 2002, so let's use a conservative 800,000 homes built annually. Taking the positive effects of each HeartCraft AAC house over ten years producing 232 tons of fresh oxygen and removing 290 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, this would mean nationally, 185,600,000 (185 MILLION) tons of oxygen would be produced and 232,000,000 (232 MILLION) tons of CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere! What a phenomenal, unexpected change of course from self destruction to positive! In addition, HeartCraft AAC Homes have other propriety, extremely ecological advantages which cannot be disclosed yet but hold almost as comparatively good promise! Suffice to say Heart Craft is going to greatly reduce upstream CO2 emissions.

It is possible to log natural forests in a sustainable manner, i.e. so that they form a stable eco-system and timber harvesting can continue indefinitely at the same rate as replacement timber growth. In the Solomon Islands and Malaysia, for instance, where indigenous communities hold customary ownership rights to forests, eco-forestry offers an alternative to outright sale of the land for industrial logging. Single trees are selected, the logs are sawn into timber where they fall with a small portable sawmill and the timber is carried out by hand. There is minimal damage, forest regeneration is assured, and there is a worthwhile financial return for the indigenous people. Such sustainable produced tropical timber is now available through some New Zealand timber merchants. Many false claims are made, so you should look for certification from the ITTG (Imported Tropical Timber Group, a partnership of industry and non-governmental organizations).

Sustainable logging is theoretically possible in any natural forest, but in practice it is rarely attained. Because everything is done on a small scale it is labor intensive and therefore uneconomic in a high-wage country like New Zealand. As soon as vehicle access is introduced, or logs are dragged out to be milled, the damage done to the forest increases enormously.

With the reality of having to reverse Global Warming and reduce pollution, it is imperative we save as many beneficial trees as possible and have no unnecessary destruction of our forest's ecosystem. This is not to be taken to an extreme of stopping all tree harvesting and development, for by employing smart, green development we have no shortage of real estate nor resources.

Our serious problem is currently those of us in 'educated, technologically advanced countries' are stupidly (because we really know better) acting worse than ignorant, primitive natives who bath and urinate in their own drinking water supply and then wonder why they are always sick! We are destroying ourselves and our God given planet due solely to greed, laziness and/or selfishness. Are we really a society of intellectualized idiots? It amazes me that in the July 2000 issue of Smart Business Magazine, there was an article on Flexible Circuits by Robert Strohmeyer about an amazing new technology of thin, flexible plastic circuitry which acts like a monitor and like a small floor mat can be rolled up! But guess what one of the ideas for its use was? "Among the applications it foresees: T-shirts with messages you can upload from your Palm; . . . pollution-sensing stickers that tell you when it's too smoggy to send kids to school; . . ."! I rest my case. Remember, this is the only habitable planet within 1,000's of light years! Unlike a cigarette smoker who knows its unhealthy but is bound by physiological addiction and emotional coping mechanism, we have no excuse not to quit polluting, because as will be proven in the following quotes, environmentally sound business is the most profitable.

The Business and the Environment section of Fortune magazine in January 21, 2002 had an article on Cinergy's CEO Jim Rogers entitled Heretic Or Hero?: "In today's CO2 debate, Cinergy is again seeking flexibility. No cost-effective technology exists for removing CO2 from the power-plant exhaust; there is no such thing as a C02 scrubber. The simplest method to reduce C02 in the air is to plant trees. The resulting forests, called 'carbon sinks,' absorb the gas. Cinergy has worked with the Nature Conservancy to preserve wood lands in Ohio and rain forests in Belize."

This is a good start, but Petra AAC and Heart Craft Homes are doing much better. It is been common knowledge in the industry that AAC can be manufactured using fly ash instead of sand. This is great because fly ash is the inert left over residue of the coal after it has been burned ("ash") to produce electricity. While fly ash in itself is not bad, there can always be too much of a good thing, and there are millions of tons of fly ash with no place to go. Naturally, the thought has occurred, "Hey, let's get rid of all this fly ash by turning it into AAC!" The only problem has been, no one has a use for all this fly ash AAC, so logic prevails, "If we spend all this money to make pretty squares of fly ash AAC, what are we going to do with it then?" This is where Petra AAC and Heart Craft Homes come into the picture by employing its patents pending which now make AAC buildings and homes vastly superior and cost competitive to commercial poured in place and to wood residential homes! Green Is Green as Petra and HeartCraft are saving forests, reducing Global Warming and using a problematic waste product to do it!

Next >>