.jpg)
Download as PDF
As an industry, forestry is at a crossroads. Stereotypes aside, today’s loggers are not a bunch of rough-looking guys with chainsaws and machines ruthlessly harvesting every tree they see. Forestry has entered an age of great transformation that simultaneously looks forward to a new age of scientific innovation while harkening back to a time of deep understanding of the forest.
From stump to shelf, high tech has hit the woods. Steve Talbot, executive director of the Forest Products Association of Nova Scotia, points to the use of computers on harvesting machines that track harvest levels and the efficiency of the operators. GPS units show the operators exactly where to cut. Back at the lumber mill, scanners tell saw operators the precise number and size of lumber pieces to cut from each log, thus reducing waste. Any waste that results is used for fuel, sold to pulp and paper mills and even turned into wood pellets at new processing facilities like the one built by the Shaw Group in Lantz, Nova Scotia. “Sawmill technology has come so far to reduce waste,” says Talbot, “some mills can take a previously unusable, crooked log and make straight boards using a flexible saw blade system. Optimization is the key word on the lips of many folks in the forest industry.”
Others are working on the next generation of products and new approaches to manufacturing. On February 1, the Forest Products Association of Canada released a study called Transforming Canada’s Forest Products Industry. Admitting the industry faces “difficulties,” the study calls for private and public investment in research and development, particularly into bio-fuels and bio-products, as well as the retooling of existing plants. According to an FPAC summary, “there is great potential for the forest products industry to integrate the traditional industry with emerging bio-technology to profit over the long term through the integrated production of traditional products with bio-energy and bio-products.”
One particular bio-product, something called NanoCrystalline Cellulose, seems most promising. Through their research and development institute, FPInnovations, the forest industry is encouraging companies to join the new Canadian Forest NanoProducts Network, a group of industrial, academic and governmental partners to develop applications of NanoCrystalline Cellulose. NCC is the fundamental building block of cellulose fibres extracted from trees. With almost eight times the tensile strength of stainless steel, as well as unique optical, electrical and magnetic properties, the application possibilities seem endless: reinforced polymers, textiles, paints, coatings, optical devices, pharmaceuticals, bone replacement, tooth repair, building products and aerospace applications.
Talbot’s word, “optimization” may indeed describe recent developments in the industry, but it also comes close to encapsulating what ails it. The forest industry in Atlantic Canada in particular has bumped up against the same problem faced by the fishing industry and other resource subsectors – depletion of resources and ecological deterioration. Businesses and jobs are disappearing.
Take Nova Scotia as an example. Even though wood harvesting has nearly doubled in that time, the number of forestry jobs has been cut in half. According to Industry Canada, this is a national trend. Since 2005, both jobs and GDP have declined across the industry, including in wood product manufacturing and pulp and paper. Simultaneously, the state of Nova Scotia’s forests continues to decline. Over 90 per cent of the harvest is by even-age methods, mostly clear-cutting. Only 29 per cent of tested harvesting sites were in compliance with the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources Habitat and Watercourses Protection Regulations in 2005. And the regulations are not considered stringent, requiring that only four trees per acre remain standing and 20 metres of forest remain intact along rivers. While replanting is a common practice, natural forests are being replaced with softwood plantations that are more farm than forest. In 2005 alone, 12,585 hectares of natural forest was converted to softwood plantations.
If one trend in this industry is toward the reduction of the raw material to its most basic component and the optimization of the systems to harvest and utilize it, the other toward the efficient and sustainable use of the forest as a whole. Citing what they see as exploitative and unsustainable forestry practices, groups like the Fundy Canadian Model Forestry Network and the Falls Brook Centre in New Brunswick and the MacPhail Woods Project in PEI have established the next generation of model Acadian forests. The Falls Brook Centre calls itself “the Canadian focal point” for the International Analog Forestry Network. Based on a combination of traditional forestry approaches and processes found within nature, the goal of analog forestry is to design forestry methods that mimic or are analogous to natural processes.
