Cut waste, not trees!

By Peter Montague The attack on the environment by so-called "conservatives" in Congress has caused a radical re-thinking throughout the environmental community. People are recognising that they must stop working alone and start building alliances. Among other developments, a new coalition has formed between forest activists, energy-conservation advocates and toxic pollution fighters. Perhaps most importantly, this coalition includes people aiming to create (and retain) good jobs in their communities. Lois Gibbs of Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (CCHW) is spearheading an anti-dioxin campaign. Dioxin is among the two or three most toxic chemicals ever discovered, and it is produced by incinerators, paper mills, metals smelters, and in the production of many pesticides. Now CCHW has joined with the Rainforest Action Network of San Francisco in a wood use reduction campaign which aims to cut the use of wood in the United States by 75% in 10 years. Rainforest Action is in it to save the world's forests. CCHW's main aim is to reduce toxic dioxin and stupid waste disposal. As Gibbs points out, paper (which, in the US, is made almost entirely from wood) is a major fuel for municipal solid waste incinerators which are also a major source of toxic dioxin emissions. If solid waste incinerators were shut down this act alone would significantly reduce the US's serious dioxin problem. It would also stop virgin wood products such as shipping pallets and paper products from being used as fuel in incinerators (half of all hardwood harvested in the US is for pallets, most of which are discarded after one use), and force municipalities to reprocess rather than land-fill or incinerate wood and paper waste. The destruction of virgin forests is occurring on a massive scale around the world — in Indonesia, Siberia, British Columbia, and Latin America. Worldwide, some 14 million acres of rainforests disappear each year. In the US, 95% of virgin forests are gone, with only 5% remaining. Forests are home to most of the world's species and most of the world's indigenous peoples. They provide important free ecological services — holding water, producing huge quantities of oxygen and providing major cooling. According to a report printed in the Lancet in 1993, when the forests of southern Honduras were cut, the median outdoor temperature rose 7.5 degrees. In addition, forests serve human needs directly, producing game, medicines, fruits, gums, nuts, resins, fibre, and firewood. Industrial logging in forests is a major cause of ecological destruction and loss of bio-diversity. For example, in the US, some 350,000 miles of logging roads have been cut through forests — more than seven times the total length of the US interstate highway system. Only 10% of the inhabited Earth remains in road-less condition. The other 90% is chopped up by roads into segments of less than 8000 acres. Logging is a major cause of this disturbance. Many environmentalists have determined to save the world's forests by confronting the major source of forest destruction — the rising demand for wood, particularly in the industrialised world. Among industrialised countries, the most wasteful is the US (France, for example, has only 50% of the per-capita paper consumption of the US.) The US logging industry expects a 46% increase in logging operations by the year 2040. There are two major paths that wood products follow when they leave the forest. One passes through sawmills, plywood mills, veneer, or other wood panel mills, and then into the network of building construction, shipping, manufacturing, and furniture industries. The other path passes through pulp mills into the larger system of paper, paperboard and fibreboard production. A campaign to reduce wood consumption therefore needs to focus on getting wood out of buildings, and out of paper. Getting wood out of buildings requires two basic steps. First, it is necessary to reduce wood in building construction. Nearly 90% of all housing in the US is constructed of wood and the average new home in the US uses 1600 cubic feet of wood products. Substituting modern materials (other than steel or concrete, which create problems of their own) and efficient construction techniques would reduce the needed wood substantially. Secondly, building codes must be changed to allow construction using recycled wood, earth materials and even straw bales. Two very promising —and time-tested —building materials are adobe (in dry climates), and rammed earth (in any climate). Fifteen percent of the population of France today lives in adobe or rammed earth buildings. A relatively new construction material is baled straw, which can be used in any climate. Straw-bale homes are structurally strong, very energy-efficient and fire-resistant, containing enough air to provide excellent thermal insulation, but not enough air to support a fast fire. Getting the wood out of paper is even easier. Today, quality paper is made from rice and barley straw in China, from sugar cane waste ("bagasse") in Mexico and India, and from the kenaf plant in Australia. There are 300 mills around the world making paper without wood. Paper recycling can only carry us so far because the paper fibres break and become shorter when paper is recycled. To give recycled paper good qualities, new fibres need to be mixed in. Those new fibres need not come from wood — the most promising wood substitutes are the kenaf plant and straw — the leftover stalks from cereal grain production. Using this method jobs could be created in both the urban and rural sectors. Although in the US growing hemp is a serious federal crime — even hemp with its narcotic characteristics bred out, the hemp plant will produce high-quality paper as well. Kimberly Clark, a US company, operates a paper mill in France producing hemp paper for bibles and cigarettes. Marvellously efficient is the use of agricultural residues to make paper, a method which requires no new land to be brought into production. A small-scale mill in British Columbia in Canada is making paper profitably from agricultural waste, and three more mills are planned. In sum, reducing wood use by 75% in 10 years seems doable. A campaign to this end also puts the environmental community into a new posture: cooperating across issues and combining economic development with environmental protection.
[Abridged from Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly.]