=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #468
—November 16, 1995—
News and resources for environmental justice.
==========
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@rachel.clark.net
==========
Back Issues | Index | Official Gopher Archive
To subscribe, send E-mail to rachel-
weekly-request@world.std.com
with the single word SUBSCRIBE in the message. It’s
free.
===Previous
Issue==========================================Next
Issue===
CUT WASTE, NOT TREES
The attack on the environment by so-called “conservatives” in
Congress has caused a radical re-thinking throughout the
environmental community. People are recognizing that they must
stop working alone and must 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. Their goal is to cut use of wood in the U.S. by 75%
in 10 years. An excellent new report provides the rationale, and
describes the plan. [1]
Here’s the thinking behind the new coalition. Lois Gibbs, of
Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (CCHW) [Falls Church,
Virginia; phone: (703) 237-2249] is spearheading an anti-dioxin
campaign. Dioxin is among the 2 or 3 most toxic chemicals ever
discovered, and it is produced by incinerators, by paper mills,
by metals smelters, and by the production of many pesticides.
(See RHWN #290, #390, #391, #414, and #438.) Now CCHW has joined
with the Rainforest Action Network of San Francisco [phone:
(415) 398-4404] in a Wood Use Reduction Campaign. The goal is to reduce
wood consumption in the U.S. by 75% within 10 years –an
ambitious goal, but one that can serve as the “glue” to bring
many environmental groups and economic development groups
together. Rainforest Action is in it to save the world’s
forests. CCHW is in it to save forests, too, but their main aim
is to reduce toxic dioxin and stupid waste disposal.
For example, as Gibbs points out, paper (which, in the U.S., 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 nation’s serious dioxin problem;
** Stop virgin wood products such as shipping pallets and paper
products from being used mindlessly as fuel in incinerators (half
of all hardwood harvested in the U.S. is for pallets, much of it
discarded after one use);
** Force municipalities to manage wood and paper waste
differently (in other words, reprocess rather than landfill or
incinerate them).
Gibbs said recently, “At Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous
Waste, we envision a wood reduction campaign that uses a
collaborative model similar to our McToxics Campaign of 1987
[which successfully forced McDonalds to stop using foam
clamshells for packaging fast food]. …Thanks to that campaign,
people now look at foam packaging differently. We need to do the
same with the image of paper and wood waste, by informing
Americans about the connections between the destruction of
forests and dioxin.” The campaign to reduce wood consumption by
75% also offers significant opportunities to create new jobs both
in cities and in rural areas.
The destruction of virgin forests is occurring on a massive scale
around the world, in Indonesia, in Siberia, in British Columbia,
and in Latin America. Worldwide, some 14 million acres of
rainforests disappear each year. In the U.S., 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. Forests provide important free ecological services
–holding water on a grand scale, producing huge quantities of
oxygen, and providing major cooling. (When the forests of
southern Honduras were cut, the average (median) outdoor
temperature rose 13.5 degrees Fahrenheit (7.5 degrees
Celsius). [2] In addition, forests serve human needs directly,
producing game, medicines, fruits, gums, nuts, resins, fiber, and
firewood.
Industrial logging in forests is a major cause of ecological
destruction and the loss of biodiversity. For example, in the
U.S., some 350,000 miles of logging roads have been cut through
forests –more than 7 times the total length of the U.S.
interstate highway system. Only 10 percent of the inhabited
Earth remains in roadless condition. The other 90 percent is
chopped up by roads into segments of less than 8000 acres. This
is startling considering we haven’t approached the 100-year
anniversary of the automobile. Logging is a major cause of this
disturbance.
Now 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 industrial world where wood
is wasted on a grand scale. Among industrialized nations, the
most wasteful is the U.S. (France, for example, has per-capita
paper consumption that is 50% of ours.) The U.S. logging
industry expects a 46% increase in logging operations by the year
2040. If this comes true, U.S. logging in 2040 will equal
today’s combined logging by the U.S.,Canada and Sweden.
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 fiberboard production.
Together, the two paths –generally building materials and paper
–account for more than 80 percent of industrial wood use in the
U.S. (the other 20 percent includes fuel wood, wood chips, and
raw logs for export).
Thus a campaign to reduce wood consumption will focus on getting
wood out of buildings, and getting wood out of paper. Getting
wood out of buildings requires 2 basic steps:
(1) Reduce wood in building construction, substituting modern
materials (NOT steel or concrete, which create problems of their
own) and efficient construction techniques. Nearly 90 percent of
all housing in the U.S. is constructed of wood and the average
new home in the U.S. uses 1600 cubic feet of wood products.
Modern materials and construction techniques can reduce the
needed wood substantially. [3]
(2) Building codes must be changed to allow construction using
recycled wood (from old barns, for example) and earth materials
(rocks, sand, silt, clay, and even straw bales [discussed
below]). The Uniform Building Code was adopted at a time when
wood supply was considered limitless. The code must be changed.
Two very promising –and time-tested –building materials are
adobe (in dry climates), and rammed earth (in any climate); 15%
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. Initially developed at
the University of Arizona (Tucson), straw-bale buildings have now
been built in many states and in Canada. Again, a major obstacle
is the building code. Straw-bale homes are structurally strong,
very energy-efficient, and fire-resistant. Manuel A. Fernandez,
the State Architect of New Mexico recently wrote, “ASTM [American
Society of Testing Materials, in Philadelphia] tests for fire
resistance have proven that a straw bale infill wall assembly is
a far greater fire resistive assembly than a wood frame wall
assembly using the same finishes.” It turns out that straw bales
contain enough air to provide excellent thermal insulation, but
not enough air to support a fast fire. (I have been in a
straw-bale house at Genesis Farm in Blairstown, N.J.; inside, it
has the snug feel of a well-made adobe house. From the outside,
it has sharp, modern lines and an eye-pleasing tan stucco finish.
If you didn’t know the walls were baled straw, you wouldn’t
guess it.–P.M.) [4]
Getting the wood out of paper is, if anything, easier than
getting the wood out of building construction. 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.
The most promising wood substitutes for making paper are the
kenaf plant, and straw –the leftover stalks from cereal grain
production. Paper recycling can only carry us so far because the
paper fibers break and become shorter when paper is recycled. To
give recycled paper good qualities, new fibers need to be mixed
in. Those new fibers need not come from wood –leftover stalks
from farmer’s fields will work nicely, and so will kenaf. Thus
the city, as supplier of recycled fiber, can coordinate with
rural producers of non-wood fibers, creating jobs and income for
both. (The hemp plant will produce high-quality paper as well.
Kimberly-Clark, a U.S. Fortune 500 company, operates a paper mill
in France producing hemp paper for Bibles and cigarettes. But in
the U.S. growing hemp is a serious federal crime–even hemp with
its narcotic characteristics bred out. This stymies development
of a hemp industry. Walt Disney sells clothing made from hemp,
but not from fiber grown in the U.S.)
Marvelously efficient is the use of agricultural residues to make
paper; it requires no new land brought into production. A
small-scale mill in British Columbia is making paper profitably
from agricultural waste today, and 3 more mills are planned. The
small scale is an advantage because it keeps capital needs low,
making such mills suitable for community-scale economic
development.
In sum, reducing wood use by 75% in 10 years seems doable, and it
puts the environmental community into a new posture: cooperating
across issues, and combining economic development with
environmental protection.
And there is one other big benefit: Reducing the use of wood to
maximize social and environmental benefits will require us to
measure our efforts in new ways. In many different areas (forest
advocacy, pollution prevention, recycling/waste management,
energy conservation, and community development), we will need to
measure our efforts against a long-term vision of where the paper
and wood industries should generally be headed. We will need to
set targets for them, not leaving economic and social decisions
exclusively in the hands of corporations any longer. Finally we
must judge ourselves by our willingness to demand a future that
more than a minor variation of the status quo. Parts of the old
environmental movement may regard their work in a new light, when
judged by this criterion.
                
                
                
                
    
–Peter Montague
===============
[1] Atossa Soltani and Penelope Whitney, editors, CUT WASTE, NOT
TREES; HOW TO SAVE FORESTS, CUT POLLUTION AND CREATE JOBS (San
Francisco: Rainforest Action Network [450 Sansome Street,
Suite
700, San Francisco, CA 94111; telephone: (415) 398-4404; E-mail:
rainforest@igc.apc.org], 1995).
Descriptor terms: forests; paper industry; pulp; lois gibbs;
citizens clearinghouse for hazardous waste; cchw; rainforest
action network; wood use reduction campaign; economic
development; dioxin; msw; incineration; shipping pallets;
recycling; mctoxics campaign; mcdonalds; indonesia; siberia;
british columbia; indigenous people; native people; honduras;
roads; logging industry; automobiles; biodiversity; uniform
building code; adobe; rammed earth; straw bales; fires; fire
hazards; thermal insulation; paper; kenaf; hemp; agricultural
waste; china; india; mexico; australia; energy conservation;
corporations; democracy; center for resourceful building
technologies; building materials;