crikey?, page-4

Woodie, it was impossible for me to follow your last post in many places but I understood enough to find you decrying pulp with the statement:
"../value adding and not pulping is the way to go".

Question: which is in the greater value-added wood based supply chain - pulp or saw logs?

Just to help you along the way: the former (pulp) is just one step in a lengthy value chain that requires great technical expertise by a host of people, including highly skilled process workers, chemical/mechanical/electrical/instrumentation engineers, chemists etc. Commodity pulp is then bought by paper makers - an equally technical and highly value-adding step. Then printers buy that paper and put ink on it, turning it into books and other printed material.

Next to that, a saw log is pretty average. It takes much less skill and expertise to saw and manufacture into an end product. Even when crafted into a beautiful piece of furniture, it has less value added than a page of printed paper. A sheet of A4 copy paper in a reem of 500 sheets has more added value than does the same weight of wood that it took to make it, sitting in a rack of sawn kiln-dried timber.

You are just falling into the trap set by the long term ludicrous green mantra that the step before the pulp (the evil wood-chip) is bad. Trust me: it ain't and never was!

Anyway, it isn't a case of one being better than the other: as a society, we need both.