There is much community concern about global warming and an expectation we will all do our bit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
So why did the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC) decide to transfer its annual requirement for 400,000 railway sleepers from timber to concrete?
According to Mark Poynter* this will result in an extra 190,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year that could otherwise have been negated by carbon sequestered in forest regrowth and saved by avoiding concrete manufacture.
At the recent AEF conference Poynter said:
“To put this in perspective, the Victorian government has firmly embraced windfarms as part of its renewable energy strategy. They are estimated to be saving 250,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year. Some 75 percent of this has been negated by the ARTC preference for concrete sleepers.”
According to Minister Warren Truss back in April:
"This contract will provide a massive and ongoing boost to the Australian concrete and cement industry … the concrete sleepers can carry heavier loads and incur less maintenance costs. They provide a more consistent, stable and reliable track and have a longer life, with less degradation than timber, he said.
No mention of the greenhouse cost?
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* Mark Poynter is a member of the Institute of Foresters of Australia, he spoke at the recent AEF conference as part of a panel on ‘Saving Australia’s Forests’. ABC Online mentioned the conference last Friday, and in particular the AEF award to timber company Gunns Ltd.
So where can I purchase all the used wooden railway sleepers that will come out and be replaced? Please forward on the contact..
http://www.tececo.com.au, a Tasmanian company, produces a CO2 absorbing cements based on magnesium. One hopes that such a cement could be used to sequester carbon in things like sleepers, rather than produce CO2 because that's the way it's always done.
The fact that the initial balance between gas the and the sleeper is irrelevant. Concrete sleepers will last much longer than the Timber currently available. Also the heavier improved rail will assist in taking freight off the road, what about the savings in diesel and bitumen. Not to mention the shipping costs that have a flowon effect.
I'm having some difficulty with the conclusion that making 400,000 concrete railway sleepers involves the release of 190,000 tonnes of CO2.
Surprisingly, I haven't been able to find any direct statement about how much a concrete railway sleeper weighs, but I did find an estimate of its volume, being 0.1 cubic metres (m3). This seems plausible. The density of concrete is in the region of 2.2 tonnes/m3, so the total mass of 400,000 concrete sleepers is around 88,000 tonnes.
The CO2 in concrete production is predominantly from the manufacture of the cement, and about 1 tonne of CO2 is produced per tonne of cement. The proportion of cement in concrete is up to 15%, meaning that the 400,000 concrete sleepers contain just 13,200 tonnes of cement.
So the CO2 released in the manufacture of the sleepers looks more like 13 thousand tonnes, not the 192 thousand tonnes claimed.
Sylvia.
Mark; I have no need to continue now we are off part time windy stuff or have the last word except to say radical land use programs run by governments leave us with odd legacies and governments are always doing big things on the cheap.
We had soldier settlements that had to be resumed, excessive hydro schemes in wilderness and water diversions that left some places without a trickle. I won’t go on.
By your reckoning Mark, I’m not green, having never campaigned for forestry plantations of any kind and believe me it’s not easy finding reliable info from recollections.
It’s hard enough keeping a thought long enough to complete a sentence.
Definitely over to you to put our railway sleepers and some quality T&G flooring back on the map.
Gavin Bugg
Gavin
If I was retired with a heap of time on my hands I could continue this on-line discussion indefinitely - but unfortunately I am not in that situation.
But just a few points:
Yes, WWII and the post-war building boom did put enormous and unsustainable pressure on Australia's native forests - they were after all our only timber source (virtually).
This situation was what prompted the Australian Forestry Council in 1964 to set a target of 1 million ha. of softwood plantation to be planted by 2000. This was largely achieved.
Like it or not, the only way this was able to be achieved was because of the conversion of public native forest to plantation. This land was free and the timber generated from clearing helped to fund the plantations - tremendous savings to governments.
At least in Victoria, attempts were made to purchase cleared private land for planting but aside from the cost there were always strong rural community protests against this use of good farming land. The only area where this was substantially possible was in the Strezlecki Ranges where farms had been abandoned and the land was thought to be useless for farming.
Many of the Strezlecki plantations were eucalypts - Mountain Ash. Forty years on and there are concerted campaigns for these plantations to made into a National Park. Indeed, the Bracks government has promised that it will buy them back from Hancocks for this purpose if re-elected in November.
Only in about the mid 1990s had our softwood plantation resources matured enough to take the mantle from native forests as our primary source of timber. As I said earlier without native forest conversion this would not have happened so soon - if at all.
Your comment about loss of biodiversity in plantations is true, but in Tasmania you must remember that the large tree farms such as Surrey Hills where rainforest made way for Blue Gum - are on private land. Plantation development in that context may well be a prefereable land use compared to if the property had been cleared for pasture.
I also agree with you on water being a critical issue - but timber production through thinning of regrowth has much to offer. For example, 40% of Melbourne's catchments are regrowth from the 1939 bushfires. Thinning studies in the Maroondah catchment in 1983 showed that removing 50% of the trees in 43 yo. regrowth increased run-off by 2.5 million litres per hectare per year. Melbourne has 65,000 ha. of 67 yo regrowth in its catchments - active forest management obviously has enormous scope to improve water yield if we want it to. Simply banning it from catchments is counterproductive, although perhaps there is a need to use it in a different way to what now occurs.
The 'greens' find water to be a convenient arguement because mature and old growth forests don't use as much water - so stop logging and let all our trees grow old is the way to go, and their predictions of water savings are based on all forests staying old forever. Unfortunately nature doesn't work that way - fire will always cause more regrowth eg. 2003 alpine fires killed or severely burnt over 500,000 ha. of forest on the Victorian side of the border - the regrowth from this will affect run-off for decades as the 1939 regrowth continues to do.
Your comment about E.obliqua is interesting. In Victoria, one mill operating out of the Wombat Forest invested substantial money in developing flooring products and markets from this species in the 1990s. There is now virtually no timber harvesting in the Wombat Forest - but that's another story.
I quickly looked at the link you provided about water. The first thing anyone should do when looking at a 'green' website is remember that there is an upper limit to how much public forest is available for logging. In Melbourne's catchments, 12.8% of 157,000 ha. of forest is available for logging over an 80 year rotation - so 87.2% will not be logged. While the site has references to how much is permitted to be logged each year in the various sub-catchments it never once mentions this upper limit. It therefore creates the erroneous impression that eventually all the catchment will be harvested.
I'm sure if I was to spend the time I could find other anomolies. One point that is interesting is that the greens have campaigned for plantations for decades - now they complain that they use too much water. An obvious answer is to have pastured catchments but no one wants that either.
Mark Poynter
rog hits the nail on the head with this “However, additional environmental problems impact on costs eg termite prevention using "soft" methods are costly and ongoing, added requirements for insulation and/or heating and cooling, added costs for building on piers, continued maintenance of timber that is exposed to the elements etc. These all act against timber as a building product”.
rog; where is “here” ? Has timber maintenance and restoration has kept us both busy??
Mark says; “There has been no clearing of native forest for plantation since 1987 in Victoria” GOOD! Let’s say it took a while though and have another look at my argument.
It’s mostly about what went on before the RFA process was invented. All governments were up to their necks in over exploitation of our forest resources from about the late forties. The crunch for timber and local pulp production came with the granting of woodchip export licenses that enabled further exploitation over vast areas. A battle royal ensued over all logs as a result.
For instance; several large private mill managers in northern Tasmania desperate for saw logs gladly had me do some part time spying on forestry operations supervised by government forest rangers (where I routinely traveled on my sales trips). I checked the date of my contract with CIG in Hobart and it was 1985. I bet small employers in Victoria suffered likewise. Note Vic forestry officers were quite helpful to me in the mid 60’s however their skill with native species beyond a few in production then was very limited
Now let’s look at other details starting with the larger plantation operations in both states.
Pure globuless and radiata stands don’t make much of a landscape. Part of the deal in Victoria over alpine motor vehicle recreation was to let the bikies and 4 wheel drives use the state forests.
My workmate Ron at the paper mill in town got dozens of bikies out legally exploring the bush for the first time (mid 70’s) and it was they who decided the Strezleki Ranges should be first on the list of tradable managed assets. I recall the suggestion of an invigorated forestry program there but I kept right out of it since our softwood plantations were up round Myrtleford. There was no chance our mill would use hardwood pulp.
Mark can probably fill us in on just what happened up in those Strezleki Ranges.
For me the situation in Tasmania was about a substantial loss of mixed native forest with rainforest types such as myrtle being the victims of sustained management programs over time. Timber and flora diversity in the APPM concession area completely disappeared. Interference with traditional honey production has long been a complaint from our beekeepers.
Government managed forestry on both sides of Bass Strait failed to promote important species like E oblique at critical times however (Mark will appreciate this); the most recent RFA review in Tasmania has gone a long way towards recognizing species diversity with numerous additions to reserves. Even the Bass Strait islands got a mention.
Perhaps Mark can also update us on the islands of red gums left dry between the irrigators. Thanks.
Jennifer: This site is worth a glance in relation to my comments about water. Water issues are likely to determine all mainland forestry outcomes. It’s also a valid perspective for governments considering new pulp mills.
http://www.australianpaper.forests.org.au/docs/Water.htm
Gavin Bugg.
Gavin
I agree with your comment about the brutality of modern mechanised logging, but lets not forget that forests regrow very successfully even after industrial scale harvesting.
I don't believe your use of the word 'exploitation'and the term 'native forest being eliminated' is appropriate to the process of harvesting and regeneration which occurs in most native foreests. There has been no clearing of native forest for plantation since 1987 in Victoria. All logged areas are re-seeded either naturally from retained seed trees or artificially using seed collected from the harvested trees or nearby - they become natural regrowth.
Even in Tasmania, most native forest logging is followed by regeneration. Some 60% of Tasmanian logging is selective logging, and much of the rest is clearfelling and regeneration as managed natural regrowth. Despite 'green' campaigns suggesting otherwise, only a minor proportion of logging on public land is to convert native forests to plantation and this is now being phased out. Much of the plantation conversion has occurred on private land on which about 30% of Tasmania's forests reside, but even there the majority of logging is followed by natural regeneration. There is no shortage of managed natural regrowth as you seem to imply.
Mark Poynter
In NSW the dept of forests grade all logs, mills complain when they receive logs more suited as fence posts.
This logging/forestry debate is circuitous, the die has been cast and the majority are anti logging yet pro timber.
re Schiller and the all timber house; essentially an all timber house is GHG positive as the carbon is locked up within the structure whilst additional carbon is being sequested during regrowth. However, additional enviromental problems impact on costs eg termite prevention using "soft" methods are costly and ongoing, added requirements for insulation and/or heating and cooling, added costs for building on piers, continued maintenance of timber that is exposed to the elements etc. These all act against timber as a building product.
Around here the most affordable and favoured is for masonry clad steel framed and roofed houses firmly bolted to a concrete slab.