Decking timber is no monkey business

Supply of timber decking is a key issue for this blogger.

Last month I read a very interesting article raising the issue of supply in the timber market for good local product.  From what I am hearing there is product there but we are paying a premium for hardwoods.

This begs the question again re affordability of decking timber that is able to be purchased in Australia which is durable and not deleterious to overseas native forests and habitats.  Merbau/Kwila the most popular decking timber is used in most cases, and this means wildlife habitats in Indonesia, New Guinea, etc are going to be wiped out, if we continue with cutting them down for paper, palm oil and timber.

Another reason for caution when building up and out, our outdoor spaces. Try to source suitable reclaimed timber, or some examples of hardwoods to try are Spotted Gum, Sugar Gum.  Actually, Spotted Gum has a much higher Janka rating than Merbau, so it would last longer.  The other benefit to Australian timbers is that the hues work harmoniously with our landscapes, and the exotic ones tend to look out of place.

to Honourable Joe Ludwig, Minister for Agriculture.

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.