>Lots of questions regarding David Orr's recent contribution. > >It is invalid to assume that replacing wood with substitutes (concrete, >plastic, etc) is desirable; many substitutes also have high environmental >costs, and it is necessary to make case-by-case evaluations of the options.. It is certainly a valid assumption if the goal is to reduce consumption of wood (which is my goal)! But to address the environmental costs of other materials, I would agree that if your goal is to have lowest "overall" environmental cost (however you would assess that), then you would want to make case-by-case evaluations. But the point here that many of my critics seem to miss is that it's often very difficult to make any REAL balance sheet (or "life-cycle analysis") to compare wood vs. concrete vs. steel etc. In many cases, it's apples vs. oranges. There's more energy going into making cement (concrete) than into lumber, but where is that energy coming from? There are wildly varying sources of BTUs, some of them extremely environmentally harmful, others almost beneficial (e.g., burning waste tires in cement kilns). My personal objective is to stop the destruction of forest ecosystems by industrial forestry. Now if industrial foresters can figure out how to chop their trees without harming ecosystems, fine. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any "light on the land" silviculture practiced by ANY large timber companies in my lifetime (there are outfits practicing more sustainable forestry, but they're mostly marginal and insignificant in the industry). So how do we go about accomplishing this? We reduce the demand for the products. As long as people buy wood and wood-pulp paper, you timber jocks will keep logging, right? So my proposed solution is, find ways to get people to stop buying your products, and you can get into some other line of work, and the forests can survive... >Simply using plastic for pallets may not solve the problem of re-use. >Wooden pallets can be re-used too! Like most of the points raised in Orr's >contribution, it is mainly a matter of (re-)usage patterns. The choice of >timber versus substitutes is often a less critical issue. You're right; using plastic pallets MAY not SOLVE the problem, but it comes a lot closer than using wood pallets does! First, plastic pallets should be made out of 100% post-consumer recycled-content plastic. This is something that wooden pallets may not be able to provide, built-in market demand for recycling. But the more important issue here, in my mind, is that wood pallets are more brittle than plastic, and once wood breaks, it's firewood (or, in many areas, landfilled)! Once a plastic pallet breaks, it can be immediately on its way back to the plant to be recycled into a new pallet! I think that's a pretty compelling reason to call a halt to the use of wood pallets. Anyone care to rebut? David Orr dgorr@ucdavis.edu
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