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Old 06-21-2004, 20:35   #6
Bill Harsey
Bladesmith to the Quiet Professionals
 
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Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Oregon, Land of the Silver Grey Sunsets
Posts: 3,886
About that Logging stuff, I find it incredible that our very liberal newspapers here in the Sate of Oregon always support the radical environmental point of view. Editorials come out against logging fairly frequently. This is pretty interesting, under the best of conditions (optimum) it takes a pound of wood to make 1/2 pound of paper. Recycle factors in somewhat but must be continually replenished because each time paper is recycled, the fibers break and get shorter. Paper is an entanglement fiber, like felt. When the fibers get short, they don't make paper. The second largest newspaper in the state of Oregon uses by it's own admission, 8,500 ton of newsprint (paper) in a year. This means it took at least 17,000 ton of wood to make that much paper. I sat down one afternoon a few years ago with the then President of the Associated Oregon Loggers (a life long logger and logging company owner himself) to figure out how to convert this to acres clear cut in medium sized western Oregon timber. He sorted thru his yield records of previous timber sales to figure tons per acre. (gross vehicle wieght per log truck, 82,000 lbs, actual wood weight, how many loads from a unit of a known acreage size, etc) Depending on the timber size, this meant it took somewhere between 400 to 700 acres clearcut of timber to keep this paper in business for one year. Yes I know most of the paper pulp comes from Canada now but clear cut is clear cut. It sure takes a lot of forest to print the message not to cut it.
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