I sent off a generic letter to Hon. Joe Ludwig, the Minister for Agriculture (via one of the many environmental lobbying groups that come in to my Inbox) adding, one heading:
Let's slow down the promotion of outdoor rooms which substantially replace gardens.
When you visit those outdoor room sites, you have to ask yourself how much of the timberused is from a non-sustainable source (a stand of trees hundreds or even thousands of years old, habitat and bio-diversity rich (orangutans), which will take untold generations to regenerate).
In 2007 and 2010 the Labour Govt made election promises to ban illegal timber imports. The Draft legislation before the Parliament includes 5 years jail for those who overstep the ban.
In a letter to Mr Ludwig, we ask him to include an obligation that importers declare information about the nature of their products. (After all, without knowing more about the timber itself, how can these laws be enforced?)
Lack of legal chain of custody is the main problem. The only statistics that we could find are from Wikipedia, which are mostly 7 years old. ( It isn't surprising how difficult it is to get a figure, given that the activity is hidden!)
A joint UK-Indonesian study of the timber industry in Indonesia in 1998 suggested that about 40% of timber throughput was illegal, with a value in excess of $365 million. More recent estimates, comparing legal harvesting against known domestic consumption plus exports, suggest that 88% of logging in the country is illegal in some way. Malaysia is the key transit country for illegal wood products from Indonesia. Profiting from plunder. How Malaysia Smuggles Endangered Wood, 2004
Source: Wikipedia, visited 1 August, 2011.
I read up on materials used in America for outdoor decking. According to one fairly reputable source, the decking market is worth $3billion. Two major players are the wood composites and also the vinyl PVC decking industries. Whichever way you go, this outdoor industry is generating a surging demand in resources which are one day going to run out!
ReplyDeleteWas reading a local newspaper and there was this house with a timber out door room. The sky was mostly closed out. There was this one palm tree in a pot. It looked pretty funny with all the brown everywhere. Priceless.
ReplyDelete