Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Wasting Good Wood


My husband spoke to a couple of the drivers hauling wood out of the massive Bragg/Irving clearcut deep (but not that deep) in the woods behind our home.
"Great looking load of poplar you've got," he said to one of them, admiring the large logs. "Those going to the veneer plant?"
The driver shook his head and said that most of the wood is going to the biomass plant in Port Hawkesbury.

From a CBC News Halifax report by Jean Laroche posted online in April 2016:
"Two top bureaucrats in the Department of Natural Resources told a legislature committee Wednesday that high quality hardwood is not being burned in Nova Scotia Power's Port Hawkesbury biomass plant."

 Yet here's proof that instead of being used for firewood, pallets, crates, furniture frames, plywood, and veneer, perfectly good poplar (a hardwood) is being WASTED in a chipper to fuel the biomass plant that creates electricity. We've been assured time and again that only "waste" wood and unusable/unmarketable wood would find its way to the biomass plant but here is confirmation from men driving viable hardwood logs to the plant that those assurances are lies.

 "In the end, the deputy minister concluded that the only hardwood likely to be burned for biomass is from the odd tree collected as part of a larger scale harvest. 
'With the various reports we've seen, interacting with Nova Scotia Power, our Department of Energy, the contractors, what we see on Crown land, we're very comfortable that this is virtually no high quality wood other than the inevitable slippage that's involved in any large scale operation,' Dunn said."
(A note: the land being cleared behind us is not Crown land; it is owned by a private corporation and being harvested by a private corporation.)
Also a more recent newspaper story: 2018 - http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/1553824-old-growth-burning-reignites-biomass-debate


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)