Feed aggregator

Carter Holt Harvey (CHH) announced yesterday it will close its Eves Valley sawmill in Brightwater, New Zealand, bringing an end to operations that have run since the 1980s and putting 142 people out of work. The closure is part of CHH’s plan to consolidate structural timber manufacturing at its Kawerau site in the Bay of Plenty. Source: Timberbiz E tū (union) delegate Maria Hemara says the announcement is devastating. “I’m feeling devastated, I feel like I’ve lost my whole family. We work together for 40 hours a week, we’ve built friendships, and it’s all being taken away. It’s like going to your own funeral,” she said. “I’ll be looking for jobs – I’ve tried supermarkets, and other mills around here. If not, I’ll have to go temping something. “I think it will be a burden for the whole community. They will share our grief. The loss of jobs and productivity in the region isn’t good for anyone.” E tū National Secretary Rachel Mackintosh says CHH’s move is a strategic decision that ignores the human cost. “This isn’t a company going broke – they’ve chosen to centralise operations in Kawerau. But we’re talking about people’s lives here, and it’s cold comfort for more than 140 workers who are now facing unemployment in a region already hit hard,” Ms Mackintosh said. “These workers, many of whom have put decades of their lives into the mill, are now caught in the crossfire of a corporate decision. E tū will do everything we can to support our members through this difficult time. We’re calling on CHH to do the same, and we also expect the Government to step up. “Instead of shrugging its shoulders at rising unemployment, the Government must be part of the solution, with targeted support for affected workers and communities.”  

The post Carter Holt Harvey confirms plant closure at Eves Valley appeared first on Timberbiz.

Leading design platform for mass timber, CLT Toolbox, has rebranded itself as SPEC Toolbox. The platform originally focused on Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) and has grown to include eight product categories, and the new brand reflects its expanded mission.Source: Timberbiz The product expansion now provides tooling for Glulam, LVL, light-frame construction, screws, hangers, and brackets, with an acoustics module to be released soon. This approach of eliminating technical barriers for specifiers is resonating within the industry, with the platform boasting over 5,000 user signups globally and partnerships with 30 major product suppliers. The company says the evolution to SPEC Toolbox is a key step forward for users and partners, broadening the scope of technical problems the platform is engineered to solve to provide digital tooling to the industry that makes it easier to specify modern, innovative products. “Our mission is simple: to make innovation easy to specify,” said Adam Jones, CEO of SPEC Toolbox. “Product manufacturers drive innovation for industry and passionate engineers every day are seeking solutions for their projects that challenge the norm. “CLT and the mass timber industry is an embodiment of this innovation, and I experienced this myself both as a supplier at XLam and a specifier at WSP. “Now, with SPEC Toolbox, we are giving designers the confidence to specify the materials of the future and enabling a much-needed shift towards more sustainable and cost-efficient construction and putting incredible manufacturer solutions right into the hands of engineers” For engineers, the platform eliminates the need to build significant spreadsheets that can take hundreds of hours or to rummage through disparate supply chain data found in PDFs. SPEC Toolbox removes the technical barriers to product specification, scaling engineering capacity and giving designers the confidence to specify the materials of the future. This directly addresses the challenge that innovation is often hard to specify, fulfilling the company’s mission to make it easy. The platform’s success has been driven by its diverse and talented founding team, including: Adam Jones (CEO), who previously felt the specification problems as a supplier at XLam and a specifier at WSP. Ringo Thomas Co-founder & CCO, who has poured his career full of experience in B2B sales to help drive the growth of a global customer footprint in a very short time Lelissie Bedada Co-founder & Head of Engineering, leads the engineering effort of 17 structural engineers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Ikhsan Agustian Co-founder & CTO, who invented key technology the team leverages to build the world-class software & leads a team of 20 software developers in Semarang Indonesia. “If you’ve got any technical barriers to product specification, then SPEC Toolbox wants to help you,” Mr Jones said “Our goal is to eliminate all technical barriers to innovation, empowering the industry to build a more sustainable future.”

The post CLT Toolbox rebrands with a product expansion appeared first on Timberbiz.

This Labor government’s environmental policy doesn’t look like it’s being run by those in Macquarie Street, but maybe by rooftop protestors who contribute little to society and inner-city hypocrites who choose mining by consumption of the very products they campaign against. Source: Australian Rural & Regional News These high-end activists are screaming “koala crisis”, all the while happily living in high rise towers built from concrete and steel, wrapped in plastics, stuffed with furniture made from imported timber ripped from forests overseas with zero environmental standards. That’s not conservation. That’s hypocrisy. The latest rumour out of the timber industry is that the full 176,000 hectares will be locked up in the Great Koala National Park. Yet only days ago, Chris Minns himself said he wasn’t guaranteeing it. Which is it, Premier? We got a Labor government that is being bulldozed at every turn by Penny Sharpe and activists running the show. All the while being cheered on by inner city independents like Alex Greenwich, Jacqui Scruby and Michael Regan. Politicians who prefer the city benefits of their own ruined environment. It’s the same old Labor. Same chaos with the unions. Same favouritism for Western Sydney. And once again, its regional families paying the price. Timber is the most sustainable resource we have. It grows back, sequesters carbon while it grows, stores carbon as the product, breaks down naturally, can be recycled, and it even supports renewable energy and composting. Compare that to driving a car, using a phone, or wearing a watch, all of which rely on mining products that have far greater impact on the environment than forestry ever could. But responsible and well managed mining isn’t the enemy either. We need metals and minerals to drive our economy and our lifestyle. Labor’s own data paid for by the public tells a very different story from the activist fairytale. Dr Bradley Law, the lead scientist from the Department of Primary Industries, was gagged for years. His 7-year study across 224 sites with 25,000 hours of monitoring found that regulated timber harvesting in state forests had no effect on koala populations, nor did land tenure. The real dangers to koalas being wildfire, chlamydia, urban deforestation, vehicle strikes, and dog attacks. Forestry, which plants more trees than it takes, doesn’t even make the top five. And yet, instead of confronting those real threats, Labor wants to lock up the GKNP which will only proliferate pests and weeds through chronic underfunding. Improving technology gives us better counts, and the CSIRO estimating 287,830 – 628,010 koalas in Australia shows they may not be endangered anymore. Labor’s own high-tech drone survey backs it up with more than 12,000 koalas in the GKNP assessment area alone. Most in state forests, not national parks. The evidence is clear for Minns and yet he is still refusing to be transparent. Instead of trusting their own robust data, Labor relies on activist driven ideology and emotion. They’ve weaponised the koala as a political mascot for votes in Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong. Worse still, the “Community Panel” designed to guide GKNP decisions was dominated by environmental NGOs, mostly from Sydney, not locals. Only recently did Penny Sharpe start calling it the Community and Environmental Panel. While Labor demonises our local timber, they’re opening the door to timber imports from countries that don’t hold a candle to our environmental standards. So, in trying to “save” the koala, they’re threatening to offshore thousands of Aussie jobs, and we already import $6.8B worth of timber from countries where deforestation is rampant and unregulated. State forests currently operate with modest Community Service Obligations, $20M in total, or $8.50 per hectare. National parks, by contrast, carry obligations of $850M, or $121 per hectare. These figures come from a 2019 report, and no updated analysis has been provided. That’s a 14-fold cost difference per hectare, and taxpayers deserve transparency about whether these numbers have shifted. The GKNP is nothing more than a glossy billboard for city votes, paid for with regional jobs. That’s the hallmark of Labor: the same old game playing dressed up as environmental conservation. If we’re serious about improving the environment, just look at the facts. NSW already has 7.6M hectares of national parks compared to just 2M hectares of state forests. At a cost of $121 per hectare, have national parks really delivered the outcomes we were promised? And what difference will locking-up another 0.176M hectares for a name change actually make, for the environment, or for koalas? Michael Kemp is the Member for Oxley (NSW) for the National Party.

The post Opinion: Michael Kemp – the koala park is a glossy billboard for city votes appeared first on Timberbiz.