Pine Solution – Bio-ethanol breakthrough may be close
The feverish embrace of biofuels by the US is looking increasingly ill advised as massive subsidies to promote American corn production have distorted various food crop commodity prices and encouraged deforestation. But in New Zealand an important bio-ethanol breakthrough using radiata pine is apparently imminent, as Michael Dover reports.
A review of its hard-line criteria on the use of timber suggests the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) is feeling the pressure from a building industry losing hundreds of thousands of dollars through a fl awed Green Star rating system. And it looks like the New Zealand equivalent will follow suit.
There might be unsteadiness in the transtasman house-building sector, but according to market analysts, prospects for the timber industry remain strong.
Any strategy to build wood consumption in New Zealand or Australia should include the fast food industry, according to the first professor of timber design at the University of Auckland.
Ecological concerns are driving a new green supply agenda among the major timber product retailers in Australia and New Zealand. Turning the heat on tropical timber importers, they are using certification as a key selling point for wood – but not without some commercial pain, as Jim Bowden reports.
Never before have so many investors paid so many consultants so much money to predict a bright, tree-based, carbon investment future. But wood industry analyst Dennis Neilson believes most schemes are more akin to a night’s gambling in Las Vegas than good bets.
The massive shift in land use occurring across New Zealand has claimed another forestry ‘victim’ – the pine plantations of the venerable, local government-owned Selwyn Plantation Board – as Michael Dover reports.
Expansion of “non-technical regulation, based more on ideology than any science or technical validity” is one of the biggest threats to the modern wood industry according to the retiring managing director of Forest and Wood Products Australia.
The feverish embrace of biofuels by the US is looking increasingly ill advised as massive subsidies to promote American corn production have distorted various food crop commodity prices and encouraged deforestation. But in New Zealand an important bio-ethanol breakthrough using radiata pine is apparently imminent, as Michael Dover reports.
