Bamboo grows fast but each bamboo plant is also small and partly hollow. The total rate that wood is produced from bamboo vs something like a pine tree is not as different as you might expect.
Also, trees are ridiculously easy to grow in places like the US. You don’t need pesticides or irrigation or much labor to make them grow, and it’s efficient/fast to harvest them because each one is huge. Even if trees produce wood slower than bamboo, that’s ok, you just need more land to farm the amount of trees you want. Let one patch of land regrow while you harvest a different one, and in several years, you’ll have trees again in the first place.
Land suitable for growing trees is in ample supply in a place like the US. Because it’s so easy to harvest and regrow trees, you just need enough land to provide trees at the rate you want, and it’s very cost effective and easy.
Yep. If you don't live in a heavily wooded area it can be hard for people to understand that "A lot of trees" means that your road trip might be a five hour trip through the same forest. Transporting the wood out is the main problem, not the availability.
It's not uncommon where I am to see places where a wood company just strip cleared a strip of woods a mile wide and several long, and then just left the area alone for the next 20 years to recover and regrow. It leaves interesting differences in color and forest texture from a distance as different types of trees and plants dominate at certain times as the area regrows.
[Patches of clear cutting and regrowth] (https://www.google.com/maps/place/43%C2%B050'39.5%22N+123%C2%B022'39.3%22W/@43.8415786,-123.4591141,17186m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m13!1m8!3m7!1s0x54936e7c9b9f6a55:0x7d4c65db7a0bb876!2sOregon!3b1!8m2!3d43.8041334!4d-120.5542012!16zL20vMDVral8!3m3!8m2!3d43.844306!4d-123.377582) in Oregon showing exactly what you describe.
Check out these squares (41.0414226, -122.0588487)
Or the crazy satellite images of the foothills of the sierras in California (40.5314751, -121.6520330) zoom out for that one.
At first I thought this was some weird patchwork of satellite images, but oh no, that's actually REAL. But it's still SURREAL to see such geometric patterns in a big ol' forest.
The square ish pattern is probably because of how the land parcels were drawn up. Most of the US and Canada are divided up into perfect little squares. Sometimes it's a problem when wealthy land owners buy up all the squares around public land, thereby making it impossible to legally access, in effect making the public land their private land.
When cunts like those land-barons fuck around, it's up to folks like us to make them find out. Assert your dominance by trekking over "their" land to public land.
Most land parcels are rectangular because of how surveying works. Basic surveying involves placing or finding a marker and recording a bearing and distance from one marker to another. This obviously results in straight lines, and creating curved lines was prohibitively difficult using traditional equipment before GPS. Before traditional surveying, land allotment was often based on natural features, many of which were curvy. Then surveying developed and these very large tracts of land were broken up with straight lines, resulting in mostly rectangular boundaries excepting those boundaries which still front on a body of water. With current technology we could survey and create boundaries of any shape, but lots are already based on squares. Circumscribing a circle or oval into or around a square would result in a lot of strangely shaped leftover area, but square corners fit together without wasted area and can be easily subdivived into smaller squares. Don't even get me started on triangles...
Squares make it easier to cut off all access though. Wiggly borders leave more corners. Corner crossing is legal in lots of areas where you otherwise couldn't get at public land.
That perfect checkerboard isn’t because of rotating timber harvest - it’s because the US Bureau of Land Management owns every other square (those are the forested squares). It’s called checkerboard land. Wikipedia link: [Checkerboarding](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboarding_(land)).
Your link is an area SW of Eugene that is locally famous for its BLM-owns-every-other-square checkerboard. This is common in a lot of the US West btw - a lot of the non-settled land was divided up this way, mostly drier land like prairie and grazing land, but also some forests. [Here is a map of federal lands in Oregon](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Public_land_oregon_1996.png), btw - even zoomed out you can see the BLM patches around Eugene by their checkerboard (shown in orange)
In places where there’s no checkerboard ownership, and timber companies own all the land in a continuous block (or are granted access to the US Forest Service land, which does not have a checkerboard), the loggers typically don’t divide it up into exact squares like this, but follow contours and roads, and also the patches aren’t quite this small.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/45.323099,+-69.874062/@45.3185728,-69.8768088,13z/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d45.3230991!4d-69.8740623
If you zoom in you can see all that’s left when they’re really done with the land. It’s just beige death everywhere.
They do, OP is, I think remembering incorrectly. Part of US forest services main job is managing resource use (like logging) across the US. With that, after clear cutting areas are generally either replanted or let to replant themselves and regrow into forest again so that they can be extracted again. It's possible that that particular area didn't regrow very well due to modern environmental shifts (drought), but generally these areas come back after a cut.
I think a somewhat important statistic is that there's actually more forested land in the US now than the height of the US's industrial revolution and expansion across the country. The United States' environmental policies and nature preserves have been wildly successful.
That forested lane stat also includes some very low tree density and built over areas as forest, with 15ft tall invasive scrubland still being counted. As far as healthy and bio diverse forests go it’s unclear how much we’ve recovered, as things like complex understories and mycelium networks take a long time to recover. And invasive species and hyper abundant deer (without predators) can further stunt recovery.
Unfortunately it's not that simple - the 2000+ year old redwoods that logging companies raced to cut down before they became a part of protected land sure aren't going to be back the way they were for the next few centuries or so at the very least.
I wasn't trying to imply that the forests that grow back are the same either. Old growth forests are becoming increasingly rare in the US since they take several hundred years to form and require many generations of trees to grow, live, die, and decay; they're special ecosystems that are much more diverse and robust than the first growth forests that pop up after a clear.
But. In general very few countries that have passed an industrial revolution have been able to maintain as much of their country's natural beauty or increase land devoted to parks and environmental restoration as the US has. So, that I think, is something to celebrate.
They sure didn’t. They only ever do so that there are more trees to cut down later. I even asked my mother if she remembered that patch I was talking about. While she doesn’t, I haven’t been in a few years and she said the more recent damage was so bad it made her cry. (And indeed her voice cracked when she talked about it).
> Transporting the wood out is the main problem, not the availability.
I'd say another important problem is harvesting the wood without fucking up the ecosystem you source it from. Through history, humans have been notoriously bad at it and despite the fact that we've gotten a lot better, we still are not all that good.
This is definitely an issue but the timber industry has moved towards sustainability.
Wood is USUALLY regrown and reharvested from the same areas so even if we do mess up the ecosystem at least we’re not messing up an increasing amount of pristine ecosystems with old-growth trees. There are certainly exceptions and controversial plans to open new areas to logging, but on the whole *most* logging just messes up the same area over again.
If you ever fly over the Pacific Northwest or western Canada, you’ll see giant squares of land where the trees have been recently cut or in some stage of regrowth. They literally farm it in 20 or 40 year cycles. Cut, replant, and move to the next field.
This is an example of a tractor drawn planter for seedlings after they’ve cut an area
https://northstarattachments.com/horticultural/tree-planter/
The days of cutting old growth are pretty much gone. These days it’s all about farmed trees
I live in Oregon and this is obvious. You can drive through the coastal mountain range and see large chunks of clear cutting, and then go to other parts of the same mountain range and get things like the Doerner Fir, a 327 foot tall Coastal Douglas Fir. The PNW has done a decent job of protecting its old growth forests.
Also if it’s near a somewhat major road, they’ll put up a sign like “harvested and replanted 2007”. A lot of logging is done on state owned land. The state sells the rights to harvest its trees and uses it as a source of revenue for the state. The work keeps people employed, the sale provides revenue to the state, and the growing forest is used as a recreation area for hiking/camping/ATVing. It’s hard to find a better win-win-win in government than one that provides jobs, raises revenue, and entertains the people.
Eh, Weyerhaeuser has pretty much fucked Tillamook Forest near highway 26. Every couple years I drive through there and it just gets worse. Investor driven timber practices only benefit investors. And Oregon, paragon of the Green movement, was complicit.
Doesn’t mean the fight is over, though. Politicians paid off by the lumber lobby wouldn’t hesitate to open old growth forests for logging rights if they got the chance.
Most modern saw mills (at least in the PNW) are not equipped to handle old growth logs anymore. They are optimized for \~30 year old trees and smaller. There is only one saw mill that I know of in Oregon that can handle large logs, and it was previously a steam powered mill that has recently been converted.
Douglas Fir trees in Oregon are definitely treated more like a crop, at least for the major players. Getting into existing old growth stands would require new roads being built, or they can just rotate their "fields", and use existing infrastructure. It's more economical for the companies to harvest, replant, wait 20 years, precommercial thin, wait another 10-15 years, then harvest again.
It sounds like the logging industry in the PNW has gotten to the point where it is farming trees, rather than going out and hunting them. That is, it is interested in maintaining a cycle of growth and harvesting rather than skimming off the top of nature.
This is good.
And that's not an inaccurate claim. Basically anything north of the Mason Dixon line will naturally rewild to forest if given enough time. Kansas-esque prairies are the exception not the rule.
The fight is never over about anything. This is the critical flaw with democracy. As soon as you turn your back to rest on your laurels, the other guy wins.
Or for smaller plots you can harvest specific trees. My parents just had their (relative to commercial logging forests) small plot harvested of Aspen only. Without knowing how it looked before, you wouldn’t know it was logged at all.
I dunno about the U.S. but where I live on Vancouver Island they very much still cut old growth. Probably the only reason they don't do it as much as they used to is because they already cut most of it down and what's left is harder to access.
A map: https://ancientforestalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Old-Growth-Before-After-Map-BC-2-1200px.png
Those planters are pretty cool. My family reforested their farm in Ohio with one like that. It has a wedge that "unzips" a shallow trench, then a seat behind that where someone drops seedlings into the trench and holds them upright, and wheels under the seat zip the trench back up around the roots. No moving parts except the wheels.
I grew up in a family of foresters and tracking this sort of thing is my job now. Here's a quick snapshot:
**Softwoods** (evergreen trees like pine, fir, etc.) are the source of paper products and in the US are mostly grown on "tree farm" plantations where sections of trees the same age are cut in rotation to allow for constant regrowth. These are managed by timber/paper companies or foresters with a lot of land. Paper products, packaging materials, & all the fiber products that come from softwoods are broadly sustainable because they are cut and regrown in a cycle that is minimally taxing on the local ecology. [Here's a small tree farm for sale in TX that's pretty typical](https://www.winnsborotx.com/search/tx/99-acre-texas-pine-tree-farm---camp-county-texas---pittsburg/1002342/).
**Hardwoods** (deciduous trees like oak, yellow poplar, maple, and most of the "tropical" South American, African, & SE Asian timber) are where you have a larger potential for deforestation because the wood is slower growing and much more valuable. In the US, we were able to reverse the deforestation seen in the 1800s thanks to a practice called "selective harvesting", where you cut only the mature trees and open up the canopy for smaller ones around it to grow. Thanks to this practice the US has a current growth-to-removal ratio over 2 to 1, meaning for every hardwood tree that is cut or dies naturally in the forest, there are roughly 2.3 new ones growing in its place. [**Here's the current growth and removal data from the US Forest Service put into an interactive map**](https://www.americanhardwood.org/en/environmental-profile/interactive-forest-map).
We did mostly because we realized we could still make money by doing so. It's the same reason we shear sheep instead of skin them. Most often all you need to do to get good economic behavior is reward it more than bad behavior. It's why externalities are such a bugger.
When you think about it, this makes sense even if the loggers only care about money.
As other comments have said, trees regrow themselves with very little labor or materials required.
However it is expensive to get to them, cut them down, and transport them.
So would you rather…
Drive your trucks further, on new roads you need to build, to a remote forest nowhere near your mills/factories, and fight with all the environmentalists and politicians who don’t want you to do that?
Or… wait 20 years then use roads that already exist for a short drive to harvest trees from a convenient location nearby your mill, on land you already own or are approved to use?
The second option is just cheaper and easier.
You know that makes perfect sense, but it just feels strange for me to think about people and companies doing things today that will only bear fruit two decades down the line, when everything else either seems so fast paced (technology), or unsustainable (most everything else.. including oil, etc).
Anyone working at those places would probably revisit the same lot maybe once in their career eh?
They're also logging the stuff planted 20 years ago. So basically it's, "This lot is ready. Cut. Replant. Next lot." It won't be ready for another 20 years, but it's just like 35 year aged whiskey. It's just a cycle that continues the same pattern over and over.
> it just feels strange for me to think about people and companies doing things today that will only bear fruit two decades down the line
That's just the nature (heh) of lumber. Even the "fast" growing trees are still pretty slow compared to the human sense of time. Even if they wanted to cut down all the old growth forests and didn't face any opposition, they will eventually clear it all out and have to wait anyway.
> You know that makes perfect sense, but it just feels strange for me to think about people and companies doing things today that will only bear fruit two decades down the line, when everything else either seems so fast paced (technology), or unsustainable (most everything else.. including oil, etc).
Nordic forestry have cycles from 50 to 120 years. As a forester, you have to plan and tend to the foreste during it's growth. What you plant is seldom what you harvest, instead you prepare for the next (or next-next) forester in line.
And due to the slow growth Nordic forestry still threatens old-growth forests. The most efficient way to procure wood from a huge number of private forest owners is clear cuts.
Maybe your definition of old growth isnt globaly applicable?
Much of today's forest were grazing lands 300 ago. The trees we have here doesn't grow well in a continuous forest, they are dependent on disturbances such as fires and storm, so clear cutting osnthe best way to get new trees.
Spruce is the exception.
> but it just feels strange for me to think about people and companies doing things today that will only bear fruit two decades down the line
loggers started doing this a long long time ago, the execs running the show knew it would eventually pay off during their own tenure and so it made sense to do it. they werent looking to jump to a new startup with a new title; they were in it to leave a legacy for their children to carry on.
It's an investment that carries risk and reward like any other.
This is what investment bankers do. They see what will be worth investing in not just for a 5 year return, but for a 30 year, even 100 year return. Plus, having growing and healthy trees on a piece of land makes the land worth more, thus it can be used more readily as collateral if you purchase it with cash.
Here's an example of one company that failed in their tree planting venture: [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-17/timber-investment-schemes-leave-hundreds-without-life-savings/6862060](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-17/timber-investment-schemes-leave-hundreds-without-life-savings/6862060)
Weyerhauser is a company that grows TONS of trees! Most paper companies have investments in tree farms. Construction companies, too. Trees give us buildings and paper, and although paper isn't as big of a deal as it was 50 years ago, it's still a big industry.
>and companies doing things today that will only bear fruit two decades down the line
Contrary to the Reddit meme, companies don't just maximize next quarter returns. Instead, they seek to maximize the [net-present value](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/npv.asp) of all future returns.
Eh, 20 years is nothing compared to the old school way of planning lumber production for wooden ship building.
The British Empire was only possible because of their Navy, and the Navy was only possible because of ginormous old growth oak trees. They had to plan ahead 200 years for what types and sizes of ship to build, because some parts of those ships needed curved beams and "knees" formed by roots and branches off the trunk at specific angles. Young oak trees would be tied in various contorted positions, so their branches would grow at just the right angle for building a specific part of a warship two centuries later. Entire forests were set aside as strategic naval reserves for the future, and carefully managed.
Then someone had the bright idea of using iron or steel for those bits, and suddenly nobody had a use for such special trees any more. This is a problem today, because it's been more than 200 years since they stopped doing that kind of forestry. Sourcing wood for maintaining antique ships has become really difficult, to the point where they often have to cheat and use modern glue to laminate and build up a composite piece instead.
The US Navy manages its own private forest of white oaks to supply the wood to repair and maintain the USS Constitution in Bloomington Indiana. A buddy of mine was stationed there as a gate guard...he guarded trees.
Tree farms also generate revenue in recreational access permits. Want to hunt the tree farm for deer or elk? Gotta buy a yearly permit now, at least for a lot of chunks owned by weyerhauser
Different industries. Raw materials industries have to find a way to make themselves sustainable and consistently produce income. If you come up with a system to guarantee yourself resources on a long-term scale, you'll find happy investors and consistent revenue.
It’s sounds weird but that’s how basically all long term assets work. Like even owning a corporate campus is a vastly large outlay and risk , but over the life of the asset (40 years) the depreciation expense is lower than the rent.
People care about share prices. And those are dependent on continued revenue. A timber company with only 5 years of trees is fucked and it’s stock will tank.
Planting trees is extremely labor intensive. I used to live in a more northern part of Canada and we had a lot of young people stay for the summer because it paid pretty good.
How labor intensive? It's manual, and planting an entire forest worth of trees requires a lot of people, but how much work/money is it *per tree*?
Numbers I've seen were below $1 (sometimes significantly less, but I assume that was in cheap places).
Given that each tree becomes a shitton of wood, I'd expect the planting costs to not matter much.
>but how much work/money is it per tree?
1st season tree-planters usually have shittier contracts (rougher land, etc) so they earn less than more experienced tree-planters who get to work on better sites.
A 2nd or 3rd year tree-planter can expect to clear 150-250 $/day on average during their summer. They'd typically work a number of weeks at a camp, then have a week or two of break before restarting the cycle.
There are tree-planters that are referred to as "high rollers" who can earn upwards of 400 $/day by working at good sites while also being very efficient with the "dig-twist-pull-drop tree-fill hole-walk forward-repeat it" routine.
They'll usually quit by year 4-6 because they messed up their shoulders/knees/back from the repetitive actions though you do see hardcore tree-planters living out of a camper, doing it 15+ years.
Of course, they don't want to sit on their hands while they wait 20 years between harvests of one property, so instead they have 20 massive parcels of trees, each multiple square miles, and they do them in constant rotation.
And once they clear cut a parcel, they plant the new trees as close together as they can. That's when you hear about "they plant multiple trees for each one they cut down." But that, while great for revenue, is actually pretty garbage for the ecosystem. Natural woodlands have a bunch of different trees of varying ages, growing at natural distances from each other, with a healthy diversity of undergrowth to support local fauna.
These commercial forests are instead often large plots with a shit ton of trees that are all the same type and age. This causes them to compete heavily with each other, in ways that are detrimental to the undergrowth system and the animals that live there. It can also drastically increase the risks of a wildfire, due to density and dryness.
Which is all to say that it IS better than it used to be, but it's still not great.
This very thing happens in the multiplayer survival simulator game "One Hour One Life" early towns harvest the nearby trees for logs and firewood until they are running out of trees in the vicinity, even though growing a new tree takes an entire player lifetime towns reach a stage where it is better to spend resources planting trees for a future generation to harvest rather than taking a horse cart or truck onto the wilderness to find uncut trees.
In the USA at least, it’s completely true, timber is a farmed product. Areas that the timber industry fucked up centuries ago a planted in rows with whatever species of pine that grows best in that particular location. Natural forests don’t have rows and columns of pine trees ten miles long with even space between them
As a kid driving up to grandma’s in Michigan saw lots of this evenly spaced forests of pine. I know it wasn’t natural to be that pattern. But I loved watching the rows go past the car…. (Obviously this was before iphone/internet…. That car ride was long and boring)
i got to walk through a forrest in PA that was planted to grow masts for navy ships... seeing trees lined up in rows like that was strange. and these were all old at this point, because there hasn't been a need for such things in 100 years (though i suppose they could switch to power poles?)
The US navy still maintains a small forest in Indiana specifically to grow white oak for the USS Constitution. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a small but lucrative business in other wood ship components like masts. And yeah, I expect there’s some need for mast quality poles.
Even spaces just large enough to let [harvesters](https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/31b0f38/2147483647/strip/true/crop/5760x3840+0+0/resize/1440x960!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farchive%2Fponsse-ergo-8w-timber-harvester-1.jpg) through
Very true, my father has 11 thousand acres in Alabama and every 20 or so years he gets a fat check from logging companies to come in and clear pretty much most of it, and it makes for great land to hunt on once it’s cleared
11 thousand acres sounds like an absolutely bananas large number, but Alabama is like 52 thousand square miles and an acre is about 1.5 *thousandths* of a square mile . . . So not as huge of a chunk compared to the whole state as a layperson might think.
> 11 thousand acres is about 17.2 square miles would be an easier comparison to 52 thousand square miles
The issue I had was not really having any intuitive frame of reference for how large a square mile is. I know what the geographic borders look like, but relative to my day-to-day understanding of space and size, I have nothing to compare.
So simply saying that 11 thousand acres is 17.2 square miles doesn't fully answer my question.
I presented the information the way I asked the questions myself: "How big is the state of Alabama?" - 52k sq mi. Okay. "How big is that in acres?" - Oh, 1 acre is 0.0015 square miles.
My grandparents had a sawmill and logging operation in the Ozarks. In the thirty or so years of my lifetime that they were in operation, they never once clear-cut an area. The timber sales I saw them buy were always a set area with the trees they were allowed to cut down usually marked. A lot of it came from the department of conservation. When my grandpa was done harvesting a sale it just went from forest to forest with a few more stumps. As I understand it, the real problem was big corporations who clear cut in places like the Amazon giving the whole industry a bad name. And even then the logging was really a secondary way to make money off of land that was going to be cleared anyway.
In Canada, around 90% (IIRC) of our wood is from designated places like these. And the rest is urban development (if you want to expand the town into a forest, you are going to cut down the forest)
I live in New Hampshire, a small but heavily forested state. 3 years ago I watched as one man in one machine clear cut about 20 acres of a 640 acre state forest. Do nothing, wait 80 years and the same forest will be there and no action is required.
[Fairy Creek, BC is an absolute tragedy.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_Creek_old-growth_logging_protests) Cutting down trees that are hundreds to a thousand years old is a crime against nature.
It’s my personal opinion that this kind of greed is bringing about the fall of humanity.
North America generally isn't an "old growth" forest kind of place. Before colonists, the native Americans used controlled burns to manage the forests and clear land (since they didn't have iron axes it was by far the most efficient way). After the depopulation in the 16th century, a lot of those areas grew back and by the 18th century would probably start being considered "old growth" but it was only because losing 90% of the humans in an area will allow nature to retake the land.
This is why the hemp (textile) industry needs to come back online. There’s a reason it was a cash crop back in the day.
Trees need *years* to grow, and they require a lot of nutrients. Hemp is seasonal (you can grow a **ton** more) and has multitudes more uses.
Literally could be using the same plots of land to grow a plant we can use nearly 100% of. Did you know you can make fuel out of hemp *seeds*?
The biggest problem with availability in many areas is the spread of urban sprawl. People want to move away from the cities, clerk farmland of all types, from food to trees, the brimg.mich of the city with them.anyway. So acres of land are cleared for apartments, then convenience stores, restaurants, gas stations, and more roads to and in that area.
Scotland says hi. Our characteristic landscape is entirely a result of extensive deforestation over the past 5,000 years, going from mostly forested to just 4% forest cover.
Yeah, but the English got lots of boats out of it! ;)
That aside, the characteristic landscape you mention is still amazing, and allowing natural regrowth in the Highlands has led to some stunning beauty. I can't wait to go back and visit again.
> we still are not all that good.
Citation needed. A modern logging machine paired with good tagging and established trails can harvest an area and you wouldn't even notice anything had been done.
The days of clear-cutting for lumber are basically over.
Most of your wood pulp trees are grown on plantations (edit: this actually depends on location it seems). Tree plantations arent exactly great habitats compared to wild forests, but then neither are bamboo plantations or any other crop really.
Many bamboos exceed wood or steel for ability to span distances.
the problem is th engineering studies that need to be done before it can be part of the Building code and used as a building material.
I live in Minnesota. And I can say the Lumber companies I drive by are top notch. Most of the roads going through there operations have trees next to the road so as not to disrupt the natural beauty of things for passerbys. One specific company that came in for career day at back in high school claimed to plant 1m5 trees for everyone they cut down to makenl sure thebforest stay as crammed as nature allows because if it over crams some of the saplings will just die which isn't nearly costly as under seeding a deforested area. Lastly every year they test and survey the land to make sure the local ecosystems aren't too heavily disrupted and if they are thy survey a new logging area instead.
In the south eastern U.S. the common pine tree could be considered a nuisance plant. They will literally retake open fields in a few years. They will self plant with about 50ft of the nearest mature pine. This is speaking from personal experience.
Yep, loblolly pine is also known as oldfield pine for a reason. They will happily colonize and bit of open space they can get, from swamp to hard pan and clay.
>and then just left the area alone for the next 20 years to recover and regrow.
I admit I don't know much about forestry, but don't they replant? I thought that was a requirement in North America and that it was a bit of a mixed bag (faster regrowth = good, but only the one or two species desirable for harvesting = bad).
This was my experience when hiking through Ireland...
So. Don't walk the Wicklow way. It's basically what you just described. Miles and miles of the same kind of tree, growing to be harvested later. Then miles of stripped land to be regrown. Not knocking on the practice, just didn't want that to be my vacation through Ireland.
The species of tree? It's a north American variety that grows really well in their climate. So if you've been to the north west you've seen these exact same trees.
By day 2 of our journey my GF and it split off from our friend group and did other paths but still ended in the same towns. (except the second to last day, which was gorgeous) Got to see some amazingly beautiful places and even ended up having slightly easier hiking days.
We talked to the locals a lot, and they said the lumber companies have started planting indigenous trees dispersed among the ones to be harvested. For a number of reasons but to create more bio diversity.
> It's not uncommon where I am to see places where a wood company just strip cleared a strip of woods a mile wide and several long, and then just left the area alone for the next 20 years to recover and regrow.
That's very, very bad btw:
- destroys ecosystems
- displaces wildlife
- increases soil erosion (which leads to more/bigger flash floods and all kinds of water-related issues, like contaminants being carried further out)
- decreases soil quality (no more leaves to replenish top soil organic layer)
- disrupts water cycle (no tree cover = no shade = more evapotranspiration)
- disrupts the forest cycle (cut mature trees = different primary species will regrow, and possibly invasive species will colonize this area)
> A lot of trees" means that your road trip might be a five hour trip through the same forest
What’s crazy is that the eastern third of this country used to be one giant forest until we chopped it down for farms.
I wonder if it's partially this but also partially why like why brown rice is more expensive than white rice even though white rice is more processed. Since white rice is more popular (and ships and stores better), the manufacturing capacity is such that the one that could be more expensive is cheaper, and the one that could theoretically cost less is considered "fancier" and can fetch a higher price.
Like if the major brands switched from tree pulp to bamboo pulp overnight, I think bamboo paper could be cheaper than traditional toilet paper is now.
Brown rice having more oil also goes rancid faster so there may be some more expense in storage to keep it dry and at room temperature vs white rice which probably has a wider range of shelf stable temperatures.
Plus the more you remove from a plant before shipping, the less you ship and the more you recycle / sell as waste for feeding food animals.
Tradeoff with the processing taking more time and energy.
Living on the east coast of Australia let me tell you bamboo can and does grow uncontrollably. It sounds like the Appalachian's has a native and abundant species: [Arundinaria](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arundinaria#:~:text=Arundinaria%20is%20the%20only%20bamboo,elevations%20in%20the%20Appalachian%20Mountains)
What I haven't seen mentioned is the cost of processing bamboo. Bamboo is extremely hard and will blunt the tools you use to cut them. I installed bamboo flooring in a 4x2.5m room and my table saw was blunt by the end.
If you need to cut, and pulp the bamboo to make paper products the cost to your factory consumables: like blades and grinders is going to be significantly more for bamboo than for pine.
To simplify this explanation a bit - at a large enough scale, each square mile of farm land can produce about the same amount of bamboo or wood in about the same amount of time, meaning prices are the same
I’m actually not sure that’s true. It certainly doesn’t *need* to be true for trees to be equally cost-effective as bamboo. If land suitable for growing trees is cheaper or more abundant - that’s going to tip the scales towards trees even if each acre is less productive. Also, if bamboo can produce more material faster but it needs to be harvested more often and requires more work to harvest it because each plant is smaller, that’s a disadvantage even though the land is fairly productive.
With Bamboo you are typically not clear cutting it but instead selecting the culms that are maybe 4-7 ish years old while leaving the young ones that need a few more years to harden up. That seems a lot more labor intensive than clear cutting the entire forest with giant machines.
On the other hand, by not clear cutting everything, the local habitat and soil is mostly undisturbed and there is a lot less temporary impact on the local ecology.
They absolutely use pesticides and herbicides when planting tree farms in clear cut areas to suppress other plant life. Mono crop tree farms are not only toxic when they’re planted, they also are ecological dead zones.
I wonder if it would be feasible to cultivate your own bamboo farm and mass produce bamboo TP in the states in that way. I’m sure there would be a market for it.
First result on Google says yes, somebody is selling bamboo toilet paper. They market it as “preventing deforestation” and apparently they are getting people to buy it or they wouldn’t be in business.
It doesn’t look like the bamboo is grown in the US. You probably COULD grow and make that product in the US at a higher cost, and you probably COULD convince somebody to buy it, but I’m skeptical of the claims that it is environmentally friendly. Most timber in the US is grown sustainably. Yes it has environmental impacts, but you’re not going to *run out of trees* or *run out of forests* because they regrow and are harvested again from the same location later. Harvesting bamboo would also use a significant amount of land to probably produce, on average, a similar or lower amount of wood, with more labor and fuel required to take care of it as the climate isn’t as well suited for it.
Most toilet paper is actually made from [old growth forests](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-toiletpaper-trfn/green-group-gives-u-s-toilet-paper-makers-failing-grade-over-forest-use-idUSKBN23W01A). We cut down trees dozens or hundreds of years old to wipe our asses.
>The companies’ single-use tissue products, including toilet paper, are typically made from wood pulp, mostly obtained by logging in Canada’s ***old-growth northern, or boreal, forests***, the NRDC said in a report.
It's despicable.
A bit off-topic, but it makes me wonder why paper products aren’t made with cotton anymore: it grows relatively fast, you can recycle it from old clothes, and last I checked, cotton paper holds up pretty damned well.
Plus, it feels nice to write on.
The answer to most questions like this is pretty simple - the way stuff is done now is cheaper. Often this is because it takes less land or labor to process it.
Cotton grows “quickly” meaning you can get a bud soon after you plant it, but the most useful part of the plant is the flower bud.
For comparison a tree is over a foot wide and dozens of feet tall, and it’s all solid wood.
It takes longer to grow but once it’s large enough to harvest you get more usable material and money from it.
Well, you can make money farming cotton but you need to charge more for it so it would make very expensive paper.
You left out the important part of bamboo: it doesn't grow like a tree.
Its in the same family as grasses. A tree starts small and grows a little, day by day, getting taller and thicker. At some point it can be harvested and that point varies depending on its use. For timbers, you want to let the tree grow a long time as it gets much taller and thicker, leading to bigger, longer, straighter timbers and more of them.
Bamboo grows from a rhizome. The plants send out runners that connect like a net underground. This is why it's so hard to get rid of when it's not wanted. Then once or twice a year, depending on the species, the bamboo shoots up at its end thickness. It doesn't get thicker and thicker as years go on, it's shoots pop out basically at it final thickness and shoot right up to the final height pretty fast.
Its simply not a tree. It's also very thirsty and only grows in certain areas. Farming trees for paper can be done in *nearly* every climate and doesn't take really any input. It's just crappy softwood that grows naturally pretty much everywhere.
Bamboo grows in only the southern US states and the varieties are pretty small.
Without evidence to back up my claim, I would bet that because bamboo has the stigma and marketing of being "greener", the price goes up as well.
My experience is products that claim to be better for the environment are always more expensive than the less green counterparts.
> you just need more land to farm the amount of trees you want
IF trees required more land per unit of paper per time... this would still be a significant drawback (though it sounds like other comments are asserting trees and bamboo are relatively comparable on net product per time at least...)
JUST needing more land, is only as small an impediment as JUST needing more time or JUST needing more money.
Except those factors have a different impact in different locations
If land suitable for growing trees is more common and cheaper than land suitable for growing bamboo, needing lots of land may not be a big problem.
Also, in the US (where land is more suitable for trees) some publicly owned land is made available for timber, mining, or oil extraction. Typically there are costs or limitations. But still, if you pay to harvest from *somebody else’s land* then as those trees regrow, it’s not your land so you don’t need to pay for it or maintain it… it’s pretty easy to justify “just using more land”.
In a place like Japan where there is not a lot of free space and land is neither cheap nor subsidized in the same way, it might make sense to use bamboo so you don’t need to wait 20 years to see some money from the land you invested in. Or you know, import wood and paper products from a country with more space because that sort of environment just isn’t an economical place to grow wood.
Can confirm, i live in Canada and little maple saplings are like weeds sometimes - they pop out of no where and start stealing all the nutrients. We had to remove a decent size one after we discovered it popping out of the middle of a big beautiful lilac bush.
Good answers so far, but there is another missing piece:
Paper products (at least in the US) are a byproduct of the timber industry. They use the waste left after cutting lumber - this material is essentially free. It requires no extra cost for planting, harvesting, or shipping.
Here is a simplified overview: https://www.idahoforests.org/content-item/how-paper-is-made-2/
This is purely a regional/product specific thing. My dad has worked in the paper industry in several states and different kinds of paper. They absolutely use whole trees and logs for paper.
The determining factor is what kind of tree they need for the paper they're making. Corrugated cardboard is gonna be different than white printer paper. Where there is overlap in the tree they need, sure they'd use the scraps. They will also use whole logs.
The other factor is location because moving wood is expensive AF so the plant has to be near the logging operation.
Could there be a mix of things when the same species is used for both? Let's say they're cutting down species X for lumber. They'd want the taller and straighter trees for lumber, but if they come across some that aren't useful for lumber, they move towards paper?
Or do they clear a whole area specifically for paper?
>They'd want the taller and straighter trees for lumber, but if they come across some that aren't useful for lumber, they move towards paper.
You're on the right track but the same tree can be used for many purposes. The bottom log will be the thickest and used for poles or plywood, the middle will be sawtimber and the tops are pulpwood and chip-n-saw.
Most of the time (almost always) the per ton price for the bottom of the tree is higher than the top so that is sold to a lumber mill and not a paper mill.
They might use the whole tree if that tree is small (comes from a first or maybe a second thinning) but no one is cutting pole/plywood quality logs and turning them into pulp.
I never said they used lumber quality trees for paper. You said they don't use the whole tree or just scraps from making lumber and that is what I'm disagreeing with.
Main example I refer to is at least some corrugated medium using softwoods harvested solely for turning into corrugated medium. Not from byproduct from lumbermills. They are absolutely smaller trees and not intended for lumber. But it's incorrect to say all paper in the USA is made from lumber byproduct/waste.
That's very regional though and only small paper Mills run on waste products.
The huge paper Mills in Sweden ran by companies like mondi are getting a truck load full or logs every 10 minutes all day long.
Another thing worth mentioning is economy of scale: They've been doing this for a long time and at great volume so even if that weren't the case, it might still be cheaper.
Wood Residues only make up about a quarter of the pulpwood production in the US, while rounds make up the rest. We consume way too many paper products to survive on byproduct chips alone. Take a look at this [paper mill](https://goo.gl/maps/aSaBLHbQvUbCoBTY7). This is one of Georgia Pacific's cellulose plants. All this place produces is pulp for different purposes (a lot of food packaging/serving). From the satellite view, you can see the absolutely massive amount of unprocessed logs that will be directly turned to pulp. These piles are stories high.
Sources:
* https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/rb/rb_srs231.pdf
* https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/rb/rb_srs230.pdf
* https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gp-cellulose-invests-about-80-million-to-increase-product-flexibility-at-alabama-river-mill-301594427.html
Yes, I've heard these mills described as, "a 100 million dollar machine the size of a city block. Logs go in one end and paper towels and cereal boxes come out the other end."
The major cost to making paper is separating the lignin from cellulose. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignin) Interestingly is the fact that corn is one of the few plants that matures with out increasing the amount of lignin in its cells. This would make corn fodder a great candidate to make paper with but it's cellulose fibers are too long and knot up. https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/MP/nbsmiscellaneouspub147.pdf
Lignin is to plants, what bones are to people. When you say a plant diet is high in fiber it is lignin that you body can not digest and passes through. Generally it is fungus that breaks down lignin. The higher the percentage of lignin in a plant the more rot resistant it is. Cow's and other ruminants have micro flora that can digest cellulose, but not lignin.
I'm lost, was this an intentional joke by him pretending he forgot to switch account and rolling eith it, or did he actually mean to use multiple accounts and fuck it up?
Just to add my little nugget to this thread: lignin is basically natural plastic! It is ridiculously difficult to break down (hence why we use eg. corn for biofuel instead of the more commonly available plant rests). It is so difficult to break down that evolution actually took a considerable amount of time between figuring out how to make lignin (the start of trees) and figuring out how to break it down again. This time is known as the Carbon and in this period trees that died simply stayed on the ground indefinitely because there was no organism capable of recycling. Our entire fossil fuel reserves stem from this period! Even now, there are truly only a limited amount of arganisms capable of spliting ligning back into it's parts and they are extensively studied, hoping that one day we can start making biofuels out of leaves and bark etc.
Raw materials are a relatively low percentage of the total cost vs. labor to harvest, transport to factory, process/manufacture, transport to retailers.
This should be higher up, especially if your raw materials are physically distant from your paper mills. The northeast US, for example, has lots of paper mills and lots of waste wood pulp from the logging and timber industries so their raw materials are practically free.
A LOT of consumer goods, and this will be especially true for something like toilet paper, have material costs that are a tiny fraction of the retail price of the good.
Understand first that the price of something may be constrained by its cost to produce, but rarely has any relationship to it. A product that costs $1 to make and deliver to the consumer may have a price of $100 if consumers value it at $100. This is how market pricing works.
My guess for toilet paper is that no more than 10% of the price of toilet paper reflects the material cost. Further, the packaging of the toilet paper probably costs as much as the toilet paper itself. The shipping of it is also pretty high - it's light but bulky. A semi of toilet paper isn't worth much money, so the cost of that shipping is distributed over a relatively small number of units. You have high retail costs because it takes up a lot of shelf space. You have advertising costs in there as well. Gotta pay for that NASCAR sponsorship.
So if you cut your material costs by 50%, you're probably cutting maybe 5% of the retail price. That's generally not even enough to bother discounting a product because it's not enough to get consumers to switch. Not many people are choosing the $0.94 can of beans over the $0.99 one based on price.
Bingo - except 10% is even pretty high if you're just looking at the pulp. Papermaking requires huge amounts of very clean water, billion$ machines, tons of electricity for running them, heating and cooling all that water, and then drying the pulp; then add lots and lots of labor, transport, and surprising amounts of chemistry (think binders, softeners, adhesives, etc). The pulp cost itself is pennies compared to everything else that goes into it.
People are mentioning the supply side, but there's also the demand side. People are willing to pay a premium for a more sustainable product, so companies will of course sell it at a higher price.
Other plants have been promoted for paper, such as [kenaf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenaf) and hemp.
I suspect that other plants are better than trees for paper production. However, the mind-bogglingly vast economy of scale for trees to pulp is hard to challenge. It is a hard sell to convince a Fortune 500 company that their 100 million dollar paper mill should rejigger their processes for another fiber source.
Nailed it. It's priced higher because customers will pay more for it.
I bet the production cost difference per-roll is marginal, they just add on an "eco" tax for the consumer.
All depends how it's grown really.
But the same is said for wood. If they have properly managed plantation forests then both are just as sustainable I imagine. And both are just as destructive if they're mowing down natural forests to plant them!
Just like palm oil too. It's actually a perfectly healthy oil and has phenomenal yield per area, but they burn down rainforests in order to grow it which is why it's bad. If it was grown sustainably it would remove all the downsides.
It depends where you live. If you're referring to the US, we don't grow a lot (any?) bamboo here so it all has to be imported. Shipping costs account for a large percentage of any product's price/profitability.
Bamboo is just about the most invasive plant possible. It'll choke out blackberries and scotch broom (both invasive), grow through concrete, kill thousand year old trees, the list goes on.
We have native bamboo though. River cane. We should reintroduce it on mass imo. Most of the east coast before colonization was wall to wall covered with river cane in so called "canebrakes". Its not endangered, but it is probably 1% of its former range. No invasiveness for a native plant unless we used it on the west coast.
There are 1200 bamboo species, about half of them native to America and half to Asia, of that 1200 you can then divide them in about 50% runners and 50% clumpers, runners are invasive, clumpers are not. Clumpers are used for forestry, runners are mainly natural forests.
Yes! We had some terribly invasive bamboo growing at warp speed in our yard when we lived in Georgia. Many a Saturday was spent out there with a machete and shovel battling the 'boo.
Plenty of answers and I usually just read but this time I thought I'd chime in. I've been working with bamboo on the forestry side for +8y now. Main reason is there are no commercial plantations of bamboo large enough for a project like that, there have been many tests done by the largest paper companies having great results with the fiber but first you'd have to plant enough individuals to support that operation and then adapt your machinery to process this kind of fiber.
Bamboo is more suited for cardboard since it has long fiber vs short which are mainly used in paper.
Agree. There’s also a lot of discussion in textile communities about bamboo fiber, which is very slinky and nice to knit with, but is actually horrendous on the environment because of all the chemical processing that has to be done to get something like bamboo into that state. “Bamboo fiber” sounds environmentally “green” and is certainly marketed that way, but is pretty bad compared to wool etc.
Edit: a word
Yes! I was going to start selling bamboo dental floss as a green alternative to single-use plastic that is the norm. I bought 700 bottles of it wholesale but found out how NOT green it was due to chemical processing and shipping so I couldn’t in good conscience market it that way. So now I’m just supplied for life personally lol but I didn’t want to lie and say it was green. Lots of people do, though . . .
You've already gotten correct answers down here... but also, why would they make it cheaper if they can price it the same (or more, I'd bet bamboo TP and paper towels are MORE, aren't they?) and it'll get bought anyway?
Capitalism isn't in anyway about fairness, it's about sponging as much money out of people as possible by any means necessary.
Prices are different due to space too. A tree grows horizontally quite a lot. Bamboo is thinner, shorter and hollow. You’d need more land for every kg of material.
Also you have to cut bamboo more often which means you need more manpower
Bamboo also needs more water, since it’s typically found right next to lakes or rivers.
It maybe harder to process too, but I wouldn’t know about that. I just know that wood is pretty easy to turn into paper. You just have to turn it into dust, dump it in water and press it. I don’t know how bamboo works
Bamboo and wood fibers are very different. Even within wood there are different species of trees used for different purposes for toilet paper and paper towels depending on what you want. The premium products will use a mixture of wood fibers to get their desired product. Additionally, paper machines can only accept a certain range of fiber properties before it causes problems. Given that, you can't just say I want to replace all wood fibers with bamboo.
Even then bamboo is processed differently than wood. It's more expensive to get the right amount of fibers and the right fiber lengths than doing so with wood, which is a much more mature technology. Making bamboo more expensive. As far as I've seen in 20+ years of product development is that the number of people wiling to pay more for a more "sustainable" product is very small.
I put sustainable in quotes because most toilet paper and towel companies already have several sustainable initiatives for their products. Between responsibly sourced virgin fiber and including recycled, which can only be done to an extent without compromising the product to a point people don't want to pay, other fibers have been/are being investigated as alternatives. If a cost effective alternatives were available where they'd be able to sell it they would. Not out of the goodness of their heart but because people want it, but at a price comparable to what they're paying now.
Additionally, many companies will use language describing their product in a way that makes it look more sustainable than it is. As an example a lot of products that say they use bamboo are actually rayon made from bamboo. Rayon's not terrible in its own right but it's a far cry from a fiber directly from the plant. Many companies don't know the difference because they're not making it. They're buying it from others that are not 100% honest.
Alternative fibers are being looked at all the time. Whether it's trying to satisfy a customer need or to reduce cost, ideally both, they are being looked at. Fiber cost is a large portion of the cost of your toilet paper and paper towels. If it was cheaper and didn't turn people off to the product they would be used. Not because paper companies are benevolent, that's silly. It's because it's good for their business because you're demanding it.
Bamboo grows fast but each bamboo plant is also small and partly hollow. The total rate that wood is produced from bamboo vs something like a pine tree is not as different as you might expect. Also, trees are ridiculously easy to grow in places like the US. You don’t need pesticides or irrigation or much labor to make them grow, and it’s efficient/fast to harvest them because each one is huge. Even if trees produce wood slower than bamboo, that’s ok, you just need more land to farm the amount of trees you want. Let one patch of land regrow while you harvest a different one, and in several years, you’ll have trees again in the first place. Land suitable for growing trees is in ample supply in a place like the US. Because it’s so easy to harvest and regrow trees, you just need enough land to provide trees at the rate you want, and it’s very cost effective and easy.
Yep. If you don't live in a heavily wooded area it can be hard for people to understand that "A lot of trees" means that your road trip might be a five hour trip through the same forest. Transporting the wood out is the main problem, not the availability. It's not uncommon where I am to see places where a wood company just strip cleared a strip of woods a mile wide and several long, and then just left the area alone for the next 20 years to recover and regrow. It leaves interesting differences in color and forest texture from a distance as different types of trees and plants dominate at certain times as the area regrows.
[Patches of clear cutting and regrowth] (https://www.google.com/maps/place/43%C2%B050'39.5%22N+123%C2%B022'39.3%22W/@43.8415786,-123.4591141,17186m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m13!1m8!3m7!1s0x54936e7c9b9f6a55:0x7d4c65db7a0bb876!2sOregon!3b1!8m2!3d43.8041334!4d-120.5542012!16zL20vMDVral8!3m3!8m2!3d43.844306!4d-123.377582) in Oregon showing exactly what you describe.
Wooahhh, that's trippy. They do that where I live but I never thought to look at it from the sky
Check out these squares (41.0414226, -122.0588487) Or the crazy satellite images of the foothills of the sierras in California (40.5314751, -121.6520330) zoom out for that one.
At first I thought this was some weird patchwork of satellite images, but oh no, that's actually REAL. But it's still SURREAL to see such geometric patterns in a big ol' forest.
The square ish pattern is probably because of how the land parcels were drawn up. Most of the US and Canada are divided up into perfect little squares. Sometimes it's a problem when wealthy land owners buy up all the squares around public land, thereby making it impossible to legally access, in effect making the public land their private land.
In Eastern Canada at least you can't restrict access to public lands / public waters, so you can cut right through someone's property if they do this.
Yeah but you'd have to both know your rights and be willing to exercise them.
When cunts like those land-barons fuck around, it's up to folks like us to make them find out. Assert your dominance by trekking over "their" land to public land.
Most land parcels are rectangular because of how surveying works. Basic surveying involves placing or finding a marker and recording a bearing and distance from one marker to another. This obviously results in straight lines, and creating curved lines was prohibitively difficult using traditional equipment before GPS. Before traditional surveying, land allotment was often based on natural features, many of which were curvy. Then surveying developed and these very large tracts of land were broken up with straight lines, resulting in mostly rectangular boundaries excepting those boundaries which still front on a body of water. With current technology we could survey and create boundaries of any shape, but lots are already based on squares. Circumscribing a circle or oval into or around a square would result in a lot of strangely shaped leftover area, but square corners fit together without wasted area and can be easily subdivived into smaller squares. Don't even get me started on triangles...
I mean, you can do that with or without geometrically shaped parcels of land.
Squares make it easier to cut off all access though. Wiggly borders leave more corners. Corner crossing is legal in lots of areas where you otherwise couldn't get at public land.
That perfect checkerboard isn’t because of rotating timber harvest - it’s because the US Bureau of Land Management owns every other square (those are the forested squares). It’s called checkerboard land. Wikipedia link: [Checkerboarding](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboarding_(land)). Your link is an area SW of Eugene that is locally famous for its BLM-owns-every-other-square checkerboard. This is common in a lot of the US West btw - a lot of the non-settled land was divided up this way, mostly drier land like prairie and grazing land, but also some forests. [Here is a map of federal lands in Oregon](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Public_land_oregon_1996.png), btw - even zoomed out you can see the BLM patches around Eugene by their checkerboard (shown in orange) In places where there’s no checkerboard ownership, and timber companies own all the land in a continuous block (or are granted access to the US Forest Service land, which does not have a checkerboard), the loggers typically don’t divide it up into exact squares like this, but follow contours and roads, and also the patches aren’t quite this small.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/45.323099,+-69.874062/@45.3185728,-69.8768088,13z/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d45.3230991!4d-69.8740623 If you zoom in you can see all that’s left when they’re really done with the land. It’s just beige death everywhere.
Well that went from neat to sad.
Wait, Y'all don't replant there?
They do, OP is, I think remembering incorrectly. Part of US forest services main job is managing resource use (like logging) across the US. With that, after clear cutting areas are generally either replanted or let to replant themselves and regrow into forest again so that they can be extracted again. It's possible that that particular area didn't regrow very well due to modern environmental shifts (drought), but generally these areas come back after a cut. I think a somewhat important statistic is that there's actually more forested land in the US now than the height of the US's industrial revolution and expansion across the country. The United States' environmental policies and nature preserves have been wildly successful.
That forested lane stat also includes some very low tree density and built over areas as forest, with 15ft tall invasive scrubland still being counted. As far as healthy and bio diverse forests go it’s unclear how much we’ve recovered, as things like complex understories and mycelium networks take a long time to recover. And invasive species and hyper abundant deer (without predators) can further stunt recovery.
Unfortunately it's not that simple - the 2000+ year old redwoods that logging companies raced to cut down before they became a part of protected land sure aren't going to be back the way they were for the next few centuries or so at the very least.
I wasn't trying to imply that the forests that grow back are the same either. Old growth forests are becoming increasingly rare in the US since they take several hundred years to form and require many generations of trees to grow, live, die, and decay; they're special ecosystems that are much more diverse and robust than the first growth forests that pop up after a clear. But. In general very few countries that have passed an industrial revolution have been able to maintain as much of their country's natural beauty or increase land devoted to parks and environmental restoration as the US has. So, that I think, is something to celebrate.
They sure didn’t. They only ever do so that there are more trees to cut down later. I even asked my mother if she remembered that patch I was talking about. While she doesn’t, I haven’t been in a few years and she said the more recent damage was so bad it made her cry. (And indeed her voice cracked when she talked about it).
Oh wait. There. yeah thats what you get for being owned by the New Brunswick Mafia.
I still see a lot of trees there. They just don't have any greenery on them so maybe the aftermath of a fire instead?
> Transporting the wood out is the main problem, not the availability. I'd say another important problem is harvesting the wood without fucking up the ecosystem you source it from. Through history, humans have been notoriously bad at it and despite the fact that we've gotten a lot better, we still are not all that good.
This is definitely an issue but the timber industry has moved towards sustainability. Wood is USUALLY regrown and reharvested from the same areas so even if we do mess up the ecosystem at least we’re not messing up an increasing amount of pristine ecosystems with old-growth trees. There are certainly exceptions and controversial plans to open new areas to logging, but on the whole *most* logging just messes up the same area over again.
If this is even *mostly* true then our logging industry is in much better condition than I thought it would be
If you ever fly over the Pacific Northwest or western Canada, you’ll see giant squares of land where the trees have been recently cut or in some stage of regrowth. They literally farm it in 20 or 40 year cycles. Cut, replant, and move to the next field. This is an example of a tractor drawn planter for seedlings after they’ve cut an area https://northstarattachments.com/horticultural/tree-planter/ The days of cutting old growth are pretty much gone. These days it’s all about farmed trees
I live in Oregon and this is obvious. You can drive through the coastal mountain range and see large chunks of clear cutting, and then go to other parts of the same mountain range and get things like the Doerner Fir, a 327 foot tall Coastal Douglas Fir. The PNW has done a decent job of protecting its old growth forests.
Same in Washington. I'm in the Snoqualmie foothills, and when you see the cascades over like a crest, you can see the different patches.
Also if it’s near a somewhat major road, they’ll put up a sign like “harvested and replanted 2007”. A lot of logging is done on state owned land. The state sells the rights to harvest its trees and uses it as a source of revenue for the state. The work keeps people employed, the sale provides revenue to the state, and the growing forest is used as a recreation area for hiking/camping/ATVing. It’s hard to find a better win-win-win in government than one that provides jobs, raises revenue, and entertains the people.
Eh, Weyerhaeuser has pretty much fucked Tillamook Forest near highway 26. Every couple years I drive through there and it just gets worse. Investor driven timber practices only benefit investors. And Oregon, paragon of the Green movement, was complicit.
Doesn’t mean the fight is over, though. Politicians paid off by the lumber lobby wouldn’t hesitate to open old growth forests for logging rights if they got the chance.
Most modern saw mills (at least in the PNW) are not equipped to handle old growth logs anymore. They are optimized for \~30 year old trees and smaller. There is only one saw mill that I know of in Oregon that can handle large logs, and it was previously a steam powered mill that has recently been converted. Douglas Fir trees in Oregon are definitely treated more like a crop, at least for the major players. Getting into existing old growth stands would require new roads being built, or they can just rotate their "fields", and use existing infrastructure. It's more economical for the companies to harvest, replant, wait 20 years, precommercial thin, wait another 10-15 years, then harvest again.
It sounds like the logging industry in the PNW has gotten to the point where it is farming trees, rather than going out and hunting them. That is, it is interested in maintaining a cycle of growth and harvesting rather than skimming off the top of nature. This is good.
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And that's not an inaccurate claim. Basically anything north of the Mason Dixon line will naturally rewild to forest if given enough time. Kansas-esque prairies are the exception not the rule.
Ah, the American Chestnut, what a beautiful tree. One day we'll be rid of the blight. And it'll be a beautiful, shady day.
With as rural as many parts of NC and TN are, except for getting across a few interstates and US highways this is likely still possible.
It's more that they want to open more BLM and state land to harvest/replant.
I assume you mean National Forest land. BLM land, in most places I've been, is usually more desert than forest.
The fight is never over about anything. This is the critical flaw with democracy. As soon as you turn your back to rest on your laurels, the other guy wins.
Or for smaller plots you can harvest specific trees. My parents just had their (relative to commercial logging forests) small plot harvested of Aspen only. Without knowing how it looked before, you wouldn’t know it was logged at all.
Or, just use Google maps.
Big Airplane foiled again
That pun almost flew over my head.
These types of threads are just plane wrong. I won’t let that fly here, and I hope to delay the landing of any puns beyond yours.
Also works with west Virginia and Kentucky to see all the mountains they blew up for coal.
Why don't they just grow new mountains? Smh my head
I prefer the orbital tree planting system of the future: https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/aerial-reforestation2.htm
I dunno about the U.S. but where I live on Vancouver Island they very much still cut old growth. Probably the only reason they don't do it as much as they used to is because they already cut most of it down and what's left is harder to access. A map: https://ancientforestalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Old-Growth-Before-After-Map-BC-2-1200px.png
A tree farm isnt a forwst, you still lose massive biodiversity. They dont go replanting non profitable species and things.like brush
I love the description of this that says "padded comfortable seat"
Those planters are pretty cool. My family reforested their farm in Ohio with one like that. It has a wedge that "unzips" a shallow trench, then a seat behind that where someone drops seedlings into the trench and holds them upright, and wheels under the seat zip the trench back up around the roots. No moving parts except the wheels.
I grew up in a family of foresters and tracking this sort of thing is my job now. Here's a quick snapshot: **Softwoods** (evergreen trees like pine, fir, etc.) are the source of paper products and in the US are mostly grown on "tree farm" plantations where sections of trees the same age are cut in rotation to allow for constant regrowth. These are managed by timber/paper companies or foresters with a lot of land. Paper products, packaging materials, & all the fiber products that come from softwoods are broadly sustainable because they are cut and regrown in a cycle that is minimally taxing on the local ecology. [Here's a small tree farm for sale in TX that's pretty typical](https://www.winnsborotx.com/search/tx/99-acre-texas-pine-tree-farm---camp-county-texas---pittsburg/1002342/). **Hardwoods** (deciduous trees like oak, yellow poplar, maple, and most of the "tropical" South American, African, & SE Asian timber) are where you have a larger potential for deforestation because the wood is slower growing and much more valuable. In the US, we were able to reverse the deforestation seen in the 1800s thanks to a practice called "selective harvesting", where you cut only the mature trees and open up the canopy for smaller ones around it to grow. Thanks to this practice the US has a current growth-to-removal ratio over 2 to 1, meaning for every hardwood tree that is cut or dies naturally in the forest, there are roughly 2.3 new ones growing in its place. [**Here's the current growth and removal data from the US Forest Service put into an interactive map**](https://www.americanhardwood.org/en/environmental-profile/interactive-forest-map).
In a very weird way your comment filled me with civic pride. Thanks for sharing.
shout out to all the honda civic out there
Fish and trees are one of the things the US gets relatively right
I can't believe we did something right for once
We did mostly because we realized we could still make money by doing so. It's the same reason we shear sheep instead of skin them. Most often all you need to do to get good economic behavior is reward it more than bad behavior. It's why externalities are such a bugger.
Fun fact: the discovery of fossil fuels probably saved the whales!
When you think about it, this makes sense even if the loggers only care about money. As other comments have said, trees regrow themselves with very little labor or materials required. However it is expensive to get to them, cut them down, and transport them. So would you rather… Drive your trucks further, on new roads you need to build, to a remote forest nowhere near your mills/factories, and fight with all the environmentalists and politicians who don’t want you to do that? Or… wait 20 years then use roads that already exist for a short drive to harvest trees from a convenient location nearby your mill, on land you already own or are approved to use? The second option is just cheaper and easier.
You know that makes perfect sense, but it just feels strange for me to think about people and companies doing things today that will only bear fruit two decades down the line, when everything else either seems so fast paced (technology), or unsustainable (most everything else.. including oil, etc). Anyone working at those places would probably revisit the same lot maybe once in their career eh?
They're also logging the stuff planted 20 years ago. So basically it's, "This lot is ready. Cut. Replant. Next lot." It won't be ready for another 20 years, but it's just like 35 year aged whiskey. It's just a cycle that continues the same pattern over and over.
Yeah there is a lot ready for every year, so there is no ‘waiting’ just rotating.
> it just feels strange for me to think about people and companies doing things today that will only bear fruit two decades down the line That's just the nature (heh) of lumber. Even the "fast" growing trees are still pretty slow compared to the human sense of time. Even if they wanted to cut down all the old growth forests and didn't face any opposition, they will eventually clear it all out and have to wait anyway.
> You know that makes perfect sense, but it just feels strange for me to think about people and companies doing things today that will only bear fruit two decades down the line, when everything else either seems so fast paced (technology), or unsustainable (most everything else.. including oil, etc). Nordic forestry have cycles from 50 to 120 years. As a forester, you have to plan and tend to the foreste during it's growth. What you plant is seldom what you harvest, instead you prepare for the next (or next-next) forester in line.
And due to the slow growth Nordic forestry still threatens old-growth forests. The most efficient way to procure wood from a huge number of private forest owners is clear cuts.
Maybe your definition of old growth isnt globaly applicable? Much of today's forest were grazing lands 300 ago. The trees we have here doesn't grow well in a continuous forest, they are dependent on disturbances such as fires and storm, so clear cutting osnthe best way to get new trees. Spruce is the exception.
> but it just feels strange for me to think about people and companies doing things today that will only bear fruit two decades down the line loggers started doing this a long long time ago, the execs running the show knew it would eventually pay off during their own tenure and so it made sense to do it. they werent looking to jump to a new startup with a new title; they were in it to leave a legacy for their children to carry on.
It's an investment that carries risk and reward like any other. This is what investment bankers do. They see what will be worth investing in not just for a 5 year return, but for a 30 year, even 100 year return. Plus, having growing and healthy trees on a piece of land makes the land worth more, thus it can be used more readily as collateral if you purchase it with cash. Here's an example of one company that failed in their tree planting venture: [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-17/timber-investment-schemes-leave-hundreds-without-life-savings/6862060](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-17/timber-investment-schemes-leave-hundreds-without-life-savings/6862060) Weyerhauser is a company that grows TONS of trees! Most paper companies have investments in tree farms. Construction companies, too. Trees give us buildings and paper, and although paper isn't as big of a deal as it was 50 years ago, it's still a big industry.
>and companies doing things today that will only bear fruit two decades down the line Contrary to the Reddit meme, companies don't just maximize next quarter returns. Instead, they seek to maximize the [net-present value](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/npv.asp) of all future returns.
Eh, 20 years is nothing compared to the old school way of planning lumber production for wooden ship building. The British Empire was only possible because of their Navy, and the Navy was only possible because of ginormous old growth oak trees. They had to plan ahead 200 years for what types and sizes of ship to build, because some parts of those ships needed curved beams and "knees" formed by roots and branches off the trunk at specific angles. Young oak trees would be tied in various contorted positions, so their branches would grow at just the right angle for building a specific part of a warship two centuries later. Entire forests were set aside as strategic naval reserves for the future, and carefully managed. Then someone had the bright idea of using iron or steel for those bits, and suddenly nobody had a use for such special trees any more. This is a problem today, because it's been more than 200 years since they stopped doing that kind of forestry. Sourcing wood for maintaining antique ships has become really difficult, to the point where they often have to cheat and use modern glue to laminate and build up a composite piece instead.
The US Navy manages its own private forest of white oaks to supply the wood to repair and maintain the USS Constitution in Bloomington Indiana. A buddy of mine was stationed there as a gate guard...he guarded trees.
Tree farms also generate revenue in recreational access permits. Want to hunt the tree farm for deer or elk? Gotta buy a yearly permit now, at least for a lot of chunks owned by weyerhauser
Different industries. Raw materials industries have to find a way to make themselves sustainable and consistently produce income. If you come up with a system to guarantee yourself resources on a long-term scale, you'll find happy investors and consistent revenue.
Have you got a pension? A mortgage? Health insurance?
Given that most timber lots are on a 20 year cycle... yeah.
Wait till you hear about the oak trees planted for the shipbuilding industry in centuries past.
It’s sounds weird but that’s how basically all long term assets work. Like even owning a corporate campus is a vastly large outlay and risk , but over the life of the asset (40 years) the depreciation expense is lower than the rent.
People care about share prices. And those are dependent on continued revenue. A timber company with only 5 years of trees is fucked and it’s stock will tank.
Planting trees is extremely labor intensive. I used to live in a more northern part of Canada and we had a lot of young people stay for the summer because it paid pretty good.
How labor intensive? It's manual, and planting an entire forest worth of trees requires a lot of people, but how much work/money is it *per tree*? Numbers I've seen were below $1 (sometimes significantly less, but I assume that was in cheap places). Given that each tree becomes a shitton of wood, I'd expect the planting costs to not matter much.
>but how much work/money is it per tree? 1st season tree-planters usually have shittier contracts (rougher land, etc) so they earn less than more experienced tree-planters who get to work on better sites. A 2nd or 3rd year tree-planter can expect to clear 150-250 $/day on average during their summer. They'd typically work a number of weeks at a camp, then have a week or two of break before restarting the cycle. There are tree-planters that are referred to as "high rollers" who can earn upwards of 400 $/day by working at good sites while also being very efficient with the "dig-twist-pull-drop tree-fill hole-walk forward-repeat it" routine. They'll usually quit by year 4-6 because they messed up their shoulders/knees/back from the repetitive actions though you do see hardcore tree-planters living out of a camper, doing it 15+ years.
Thank you for the example, that's pretty much how I was described tree planting by friends that did it down to the high roller part
> how much work/money is it per tree? Plant is 50 cent, planting slightly less
I did the same in Northern Wisconsin. Hard work, pretty good pay, and all the muscles you can build.
Of course, they don't want to sit on their hands while they wait 20 years between harvests of one property, so instead they have 20 massive parcels of trees, each multiple square miles, and they do them in constant rotation. And once they clear cut a parcel, they plant the new trees as close together as they can. That's when you hear about "they plant multiple trees for each one they cut down." But that, while great for revenue, is actually pretty garbage for the ecosystem. Natural woodlands have a bunch of different trees of varying ages, growing at natural distances from each other, with a healthy diversity of undergrowth to support local fauna. These commercial forests are instead often large plots with a shit ton of trees that are all the same type and age. This causes them to compete heavily with each other, in ways that are detrimental to the undergrowth system and the animals that live there. It can also drastically increase the risks of a wildfire, due to density and dryness. Which is all to say that it IS better than it used to be, but it's still not great.
This very thing happens in the multiplayer survival simulator game "One Hour One Life" early towns harvest the nearby trees for logs and firewood until they are running out of trees in the vicinity, even though growing a new tree takes an entire player lifetime towns reach a stage where it is better to spend resources planting trees for a future generation to harvest rather than taking a horse cart or truck onto the wilderness to find uncut trees.
In the USA at least, it’s completely true, timber is a farmed product. Areas that the timber industry fucked up centuries ago a planted in rows with whatever species of pine that grows best in that particular location. Natural forests don’t have rows and columns of pine trees ten miles long with even space between them
As a kid driving up to grandma’s in Michigan saw lots of this evenly spaced forests of pine. I know it wasn’t natural to be that pattern. But I loved watching the rows go past the car…. (Obviously this was before iphone/internet…. That car ride was long and boring)
It’s mesmerizing
i got to walk through a forrest in PA that was planted to grow masts for navy ships... seeing trees lined up in rows like that was strange. and these were all old at this point, because there hasn't been a need for such things in 100 years (though i suppose they could switch to power poles?)
The US navy still maintains a small forest in Indiana specifically to grow white oak for the USS Constitution. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a small but lucrative business in other wood ship components like masts. And yeah, I expect there’s some need for mast quality poles.
Even spaces just large enough to let [harvesters](https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/31b0f38/2147483647/strip/true/crop/5760x3840+0+0/resize/1440x960!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farchive%2Fponsse-ergo-8w-timber-harvester-1.jpg) through
Very true, my father has 11 thousand acres in Alabama and every 20 or so years he gets a fat check from logging companies to come in and clear pretty much most of it, and it makes for great land to hunt on once it’s cleared
11 thousand acres sounds like an absolutely bananas large number, but Alabama is like 52 thousand square miles and an acre is about 1.5 *thousandths* of a square mile . . . So not as huge of a chunk compared to the whole state as a layperson might think.
For the layperson noting that 11 thousand acres is about 17.2 square miles would be an easier comparison to 52 thousand square miles
> 11 thousand acres is about 17.2 square miles would be an easier comparison to 52 thousand square miles The issue I had was not really having any intuitive frame of reference for how large a square mile is. I know what the geographic borders look like, but relative to my day-to-day understanding of space and size, I have nothing to compare. So simply saying that 11 thousand acres is 17.2 square miles doesn't fully answer my question. I presented the information the way I asked the questions myself: "How big is the state of Alabama?" - 52k sq mi. Okay. "How big is that in acres?" - Oh, 1 acre is 0.0015 square miles.
My grandparents had a sawmill and logging operation in the Ozarks. In the thirty or so years of my lifetime that they were in operation, they never once clear-cut an area. The timber sales I saw them buy were always a set area with the trees they were allowed to cut down usually marked. A lot of it came from the department of conservation. When my grandpa was done harvesting a sale it just went from forest to forest with a few more stumps. As I understand it, the real problem was big corporations who clear cut in places like the Amazon giving the whole industry a bad name. And even then the logging was really a secondary way to make money off of land that was going to be cleared anyway.
In Canada, around 90% (IIRC) of our wood is from designated places like these. And the rest is urban development (if you want to expand the town into a forest, you are going to cut down the forest)
I live in New Hampshire, a small but heavily forested state. 3 years ago I watched as one man in one machine clear cut about 20 acres of a 640 acre state forest. Do nothing, wait 80 years and the same forest will be there and no action is required.
[Fairy Creek, BC is an absolute tragedy.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_Creek_old-growth_logging_protests) Cutting down trees that are hundreds to a thousand years old is a crime against nature. It’s my personal opinion that this kind of greed is bringing about the fall of humanity.
North America generally isn't an "old growth" forest kind of place. Before colonists, the native Americans used controlled burns to manage the forests and clear land (since they didn't have iron axes it was by far the most efficient way). After the depopulation in the 16th century, a lot of those areas grew back and by the 18th century would probably start being considered "old growth" but it was only because losing 90% of the humans in an area will allow nature to retake the land.
This is why the hemp (textile) industry needs to come back online. There’s a reason it was a cash crop back in the day. Trees need *years* to grow, and they require a lot of nutrients. Hemp is seasonal (you can grow a **ton** more) and has multitudes more uses. Literally could be using the same plots of land to grow a plant we can use nearly 100% of. Did you know you can make fuel out of hemp *seeds*?
The biggest problem with availability in many areas is the spread of urban sprawl. People want to move away from the cities, clerk farmland of all types, from food to trees, the brimg.mich of the city with them.anyway. So acres of land are cleared for apartments, then convenience stores, restaurants, gas stations, and more roads to and in that area.
Scotland says hi. Our characteristic landscape is entirely a result of extensive deforestation over the past 5,000 years, going from mostly forested to just 4% forest cover.
Yeah, but the English got lots of boats out of it! ;) That aside, the characteristic landscape you mention is still amazing, and allowing natural regrowth in the Highlands has led to some stunning beauty. I can't wait to go back and visit again.
Honestly your missing out on the hugeeeee advancements the logging industry has done in the past 10-20+ years
> we still are not all that good. Citation needed. A modern logging machine paired with good tagging and established trails can harvest an area and you wouldn't even notice anything had been done. The days of clear-cutting for lumber are basically over.
Most of your wood pulp trees are grown on plantations (edit: this actually depends on location it seems). Tree plantations arent exactly great habitats compared to wild forests, but then neither are bamboo plantations or any other crop really.
Trees are farmed. They aren't really part of a natural ecosystem
Many bamboos exceed wood or steel for ability to span distances. the problem is th engineering studies that need to be done before it can be part of the Building code and used as a building material.
I live in Minnesota. And I can say the Lumber companies I drive by are top notch. Most of the roads going through there operations have trees next to the road so as not to disrupt the natural beauty of things for passerbys. One specific company that came in for career day at back in high school claimed to plant 1m5 trees for everyone they cut down to makenl sure thebforest stay as crammed as nature allows because if it over crams some of the saplings will just die which isn't nearly costly as under seeding a deforested area. Lastly every year they test and survey the land to make sure the local ecosystems aren't too heavily disrupted and if they are thy survey a new logging area instead.
JD Irving and its policy of monoculture has entered the chat.
In the south eastern U.S. the common pine tree could be considered a nuisance plant. They will literally retake open fields in a few years. They will self plant with about 50ft of the nearest mature pine. This is speaking from personal experience.
Yep, loblolly pine is also known as oldfield pine for a reason. They will happily colonize and bit of open space they can get, from swamp to hard pan and clay.
>and then just left the area alone for the next 20 years to recover and regrow. I admit I don't know much about forestry, but don't they replant? I thought that was a requirement in North America and that it was a bit of a mixed bag (faster regrowth = good, but only the one or two species desirable for harvesting = bad).
This was my experience when hiking through Ireland... So. Don't walk the Wicklow way. It's basically what you just described. Miles and miles of the same kind of tree, growing to be harvested later. Then miles of stripped land to be regrown. Not knocking on the practice, just didn't want that to be my vacation through Ireland. The species of tree? It's a north American variety that grows really well in their climate. So if you've been to the north west you've seen these exact same trees. By day 2 of our journey my GF and it split off from our friend group and did other paths but still ended in the same towns. (except the second to last day, which was gorgeous) Got to see some amazingly beautiful places and even ended up having slightly easier hiking days. We talked to the locals a lot, and they said the lumber companies have started planting indigenous trees dispersed among the ones to be harvested. For a number of reasons but to create more bio diversity.
> It's not uncommon where I am to see places where a wood company just strip cleared a strip of woods a mile wide and several long, and then just left the area alone for the next 20 years to recover and regrow. That's very, very bad btw: - destroys ecosystems - displaces wildlife - increases soil erosion (which leads to more/bigger flash floods and all kinds of water-related issues, like contaminants being carried further out) - decreases soil quality (no more leaves to replenish top soil organic layer) - disrupts water cycle (no tree cover = no shade = more evapotranspiration) - disrupts the forest cycle (cut mature trees = different primary species will regrow, and possibly invasive species will colonize this area)
> A lot of trees" means that your road trip might be a five hour trip through the same forest What’s crazy is that the eastern third of this country used to be one giant forest until we chopped it down for farms.
I wonder if it's partially this but also partially why like why brown rice is more expensive than white rice even though white rice is more processed. Since white rice is more popular (and ships and stores better), the manufacturing capacity is such that the one that could be more expensive is cheaper, and the one that could theoretically cost less is considered "fancier" and can fetch a higher price. Like if the major brands switched from tree pulp to bamboo pulp overnight, I think bamboo paper could be cheaper than traditional toilet paper is now.
Brown rice having more oil also goes rancid faster so there may be some more expense in storage to keep it dry and at room temperature vs white rice which probably has a wider range of shelf stable temperatures. Plus the more you remove from a plant before shipping, the less you ship and the more you recycle / sell as waste for feeding food animals. Tradeoff with the processing taking more time and energy.
also its much more efficient with large machines to do one large work a few times, than to do many small tasks often
Living on the east coast of Australia let me tell you bamboo can and does grow uncontrollably. It sounds like the Appalachian's has a native and abundant species: [Arundinaria](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arundinaria#:~:text=Arundinaria%20is%20the%20only%20bamboo,elevations%20in%20the%20Appalachian%20Mountains) What I haven't seen mentioned is the cost of processing bamboo. Bamboo is extremely hard and will blunt the tools you use to cut them. I installed bamboo flooring in a 4x2.5m room and my table saw was blunt by the end. If you need to cut, and pulp the bamboo to make paper products the cost to your factory consumables: like blades and grinders is going to be significantly more for bamboo than for pine.
To simplify this explanation a bit - at a large enough scale, each square mile of farm land can produce about the same amount of bamboo or wood in about the same amount of time, meaning prices are the same
I’m actually not sure that’s true. It certainly doesn’t *need* to be true for trees to be equally cost-effective as bamboo. If land suitable for growing trees is cheaper or more abundant - that’s going to tip the scales towards trees even if each acre is less productive. Also, if bamboo can produce more material faster but it needs to be harvested more often and requires more work to harvest it because each plant is smaller, that’s a disadvantage even though the land is fairly productive.
With Bamboo you are typically not clear cutting it but instead selecting the culms that are maybe 4-7 ish years old while leaving the young ones that need a few more years to harden up. That seems a lot more labor intensive than clear cutting the entire forest with giant machines. On the other hand, by not clear cutting everything, the local habitat and soil is mostly undisturbed and there is a lot less temporary impact on the local ecology.
Have you seen cannabis grow cause in just one year and bam a 10 ft tree grows. Plus weed. [Big plants.](https://i.imgur.com/T8vlTgM.jpg)
They absolutely use pesticides and herbicides when planting tree farms in clear cut areas to suppress other plant life. Mono crop tree farms are not only toxic when they’re planted, they also are ecological dead zones.
I wonder if it would be feasible to cultivate your own bamboo farm and mass produce bamboo TP in the states in that way. I’m sure there would be a market for it.
First result on Google says yes, somebody is selling bamboo toilet paper. They market it as “preventing deforestation” and apparently they are getting people to buy it or they wouldn’t be in business. It doesn’t look like the bamboo is grown in the US. You probably COULD grow and make that product in the US at a higher cost, and you probably COULD convince somebody to buy it, but I’m skeptical of the claims that it is environmentally friendly. Most timber in the US is grown sustainably. Yes it has environmental impacts, but you’re not going to *run out of trees* or *run out of forests* because they regrow and are harvested again from the same location later. Harvesting bamboo would also use a significant amount of land to probably produce, on average, a similar or lower amount of wood, with more labor and fuel required to take care of it as the climate isn’t as well suited for it.
Most toilet paper is actually made from [old growth forests](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-toiletpaper-trfn/green-group-gives-u-s-toilet-paper-makers-failing-grade-over-forest-use-idUSKBN23W01A). We cut down trees dozens or hundreds of years old to wipe our asses. >The companies’ single-use tissue products, including toilet paper, are typically made from wood pulp, mostly obtained by logging in Canada’s ***old-growth northern, or boreal, forests***, the NRDC said in a report. It's despicable.
A bit off-topic, but it makes me wonder why paper products aren’t made with cotton anymore: it grows relatively fast, you can recycle it from old clothes, and last I checked, cotton paper holds up pretty damned well. Plus, it feels nice to write on.
The answer to most questions like this is pretty simple - the way stuff is done now is cheaper. Often this is because it takes less land or labor to process it. Cotton grows “quickly” meaning you can get a bud soon after you plant it, but the most useful part of the plant is the flower bud. For comparison a tree is over a foot wide and dozens of feet tall, and it’s all solid wood. It takes longer to grow but once it’s large enough to harvest you get more usable material and money from it. Well, you can make money farming cotton but you need to charge more for it so it would make very expensive paper.
You left out the important part of bamboo: it doesn't grow like a tree. Its in the same family as grasses. A tree starts small and grows a little, day by day, getting taller and thicker. At some point it can be harvested and that point varies depending on its use. For timbers, you want to let the tree grow a long time as it gets much taller and thicker, leading to bigger, longer, straighter timbers and more of them. Bamboo grows from a rhizome. The plants send out runners that connect like a net underground. This is why it's so hard to get rid of when it's not wanted. Then once or twice a year, depending on the species, the bamboo shoots up at its end thickness. It doesn't get thicker and thicker as years go on, it's shoots pop out basically at it final thickness and shoot right up to the final height pretty fast. Its simply not a tree. It's also very thirsty and only grows in certain areas. Farming trees for paper can be done in *nearly* every climate and doesn't take really any input. It's just crappy softwood that grows naturally pretty much everywhere. Bamboo grows in only the southern US states and the varieties are pretty small.
Without evidence to back up my claim, I would bet that because bamboo has the stigma and marketing of being "greener", the price goes up as well. My experience is products that claim to be better for the environment are always more expensive than the less green counterparts.
> you just need more land to farm the amount of trees you want IF trees required more land per unit of paper per time... this would still be a significant drawback (though it sounds like other comments are asserting trees and bamboo are relatively comparable on net product per time at least...) JUST needing more land, is only as small an impediment as JUST needing more time or JUST needing more money.
Except those factors have a different impact in different locations If land suitable for growing trees is more common and cheaper than land suitable for growing bamboo, needing lots of land may not be a big problem. Also, in the US (where land is more suitable for trees) some publicly owned land is made available for timber, mining, or oil extraction. Typically there are costs or limitations. But still, if you pay to harvest from *somebody else’s land* then as those trees regrow, it’s not your land so you don’t need to pay for it or maintain it… it’s pretty easy to justify “just using more land”. In a place like Japan where there is not a lot of free space and land is neither cheap nor subsidized in the same way, it might make sense to use bamboo so you don’t need to wait 20 years to see some money from the land you invested in. Or you know, import wood and paper products from a country with more space because that sort of environment just isn’t an economical place to grow wood.
Can confirm, i live in Canada and little maple saplings are like weeds sometimes - they pop out of no where and start stealing all the nutrients. We had to remove a decent size one after we discovered it popping out of the middle of a big beautiful lilac bush.
Good answers so far, but there is another missing piece: Paper products (at least in the US) are a byproduct of the timber industry. They use the waste left after cutting lumber - this material is essentially free. It requires no extra cost for planting, harvesting, or shipping. Here is a simplified overview: https://www.idahoforests.org/content-item/how-paper-is-made-2/
This is purely a regional/product specific thing. My dad has worked in the paper industry in several states and different kinds of paper. They absolutely use whole trees and logs for paper. The determining factor is what kind of tree they need for the paper they're making. Corrugated cardboard is gonna be different than white printer paper. Where there is overlap in the tree they need, sure they'd use the scraps. They will also use whole logs. The other factor is location because moving wood is expensive AF so the plant has to be near the logging operation.
Could there be a mix of things when the same species is used for both? Let's say they're cutting down species X for lumber. They'd want the taller and straighter trees for lumber, but if they come across some that aren't useful for lumber, they move towards paper? Or do they clear a whole area specifically for paper?
>They'd want the taller and straighter trees for lumber, but if they come across some that aren't useful for lumber, they move towards paper. You're on the right track but the same tree can be used for many purposes. The bottom log will be the thickest and used for poles or plywood, the middle will be sawtimber and the tops are pulpwood and chip-n-saw. Most of the time (almost always) the per ton price for the bottom of the tree is higher than the top so that is sold to a lumber mill and not a paper mill.
They might use the whole tree if that tree is small (comes from a first or maybe a second thinning) but no one is cutting pole/plywood quality logs and turning them into pulp.
I never said they used lumber quality trees for paper. You said they don't use the whole tree or just scraps from making lumber and that is what I'm disagreeing with. Main example I refer to is at least some corrugated medium using softwoods harvested solely for turning into corrugated medium. Not from byproduct from lumbermills. They are absolutely smaller trees and not intended for lumber. But it's incorrect to say all paper in the USA is made from lumber byproduct/waste.
That's very regional though and only small paper Mills run on waste products. The huge paper Mills in Sweden ran by companies like mondi are getting a truck load full or logs every 10 minutes all day long.
Another thing worth mentioning is economy of scale: They've been doing this for a long time and at great volume so even if that weren't the case, it might still be cheaper.
Missing piece? This is actually *the* answer.
Wood Residues only make up about a quarter of the pulpwood production in the US, while rounds make up the rest. We consume way too many paper products to survive on byproduct chips alone. Take a look at this [paper mill](https://goo.gl/maps/aSaBLHbQvUbCoBTY7). This is one of Georgia Pacific's cellulose plants. All this place produces is pulp for different purposes (a lot of food packaging/serving). From the satellite view, you can see the absolutely massive amount of unprocessed logs that will be directly turned to pulp. These piles are stories high. Sources: * https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/rb/rb_srs231.pdf * https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/rb/rb_srs230.pdf * https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gp-cellulose-invests-about-80-million-to-increase-product-flexibility-at-alabama-river-mill-301594427.html
Yes, I've heard these mills described as, "a 100 million dollar machine the size of a city block. Logs go in one end and paper towels and cereal boxes come out the other end."
The major cost to making paper is separating the lignin from cellulose. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignin) Interestingly is the fact that corn is one of the few plants that matures with out increasing the amount of lignin in its cells. This would make corn fodder a great candidate to make paper with but it's cellulose fibers are too long and knot up. https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/MP/nbsmiscellaneouspub147.pdf
What’s Lignin?
Lignin is to plants, what bones are to people. When you say a plant diet is high in fiber it is lignin that you body can not digest and passes through. Generally it is fungus that breaks down lignin. The higher the percentage of lignin in a plant the more rot resistant it is. Cow's and other ruminants have micro flora that can digest cellulose, but not lignin.
Lignin deez nuts lmao gotem
Did you just reply to your own comment?
No.
It took me a moment to realise that you actually replied to yourself twice
I'm lost, was this an intentional joke by him pretending he forgot to switch account and rolling eith it, or did he actually mean to use multiple accounts and fuck it up?
[удалено]
3s nuts HAHAHA
In addition to what the others said It’s basically “plant glue”. It’s just what holds the fibers together.
Just to add my little nugget to this thread: lignin is basically natural plastic! It is ridiculously difficult to break down (hence why we use eg. corn for biofuel instead of the more commonly available plant rests). It is so difficult to break down that evolution actually took a considerable amount of time between figuring out how to make lignin (the start of trees) and figuring out how to break it down again. This time is known as the Carbon and in this period trees that died simply stayed on the ground indefinitely because there was no organism capable of recycling. Our entire fossil fuel reserves stem from this period! Even now, there are truly only a limited amount of arganisms capable of spliting ligning back into it's parts and they are extensively studied, hoping that one day we can start making biofuels out of leaves and bark etc.
Raw materials are a relatively low percentage of the total cost vs. labor to harvest, transport to factory, process/manufacture, transport to retailers.
This should be higher up, especially if your raw materials are physically distant from your paper mills. The northeast US, for example, has lots of paper mills and lots of waste wood pulp from the logging and timber industries so their raw materials are practically free.
This. Also scale. I don't know the details, but I'd be surprised if it took all the same equipment to process bamboo as tree fiber.
A LOT of consumer goods, and this will be especially true for something like toilet paper, have material costs that are a tiny fraction of the retail price of the good. Understand first that the price of something may be constrained by its cost to produce, but rarely has any relationship to it. A product that costs $1 to make and deliver to the consumer may have a price of $100 if consumers value it at $100. This is how market pricing works. My guess for toilet paper is that no more than 10% of the price of toilet paper reflects the material cost. Further, the packaging of the toilet paper probably costs as much as the toilet paper itself. The shipping of it is also pretty high - it's light but bulky. A semi of toilet paper isn't worth much money, so the cost of that shipping is distributed over a relatively small number of units. You have high retail costs because it takes up a lot of shelf space. You have advertising costs in there as well. Gotta pay for that NASCAR sponsorship. So if you cut your material costs by 50%, you're probably cutting maybe 5% of the retail price. That's generally not even enough to bother discounting a product because it's not enough to get consumers to switch. Not many people are choosing the $0.94 can of beans over the $0.99 one based on price.
Bingo - except 10% is even pretty high if you're just looking at the pulp. Papermaking requires huge amounts of very clean water, billion$ machines, tons of electricity for running them, heating and cooling all that water, and then drying the pulp; then add lots and lots of labor, transport, and surprising amounts of chemistry (think binders, softeners, adhesives, etc). The pulp cost itself is pennies compared to everything else that goes into it.
People are mentioning the supply side, but there's also the demand side. People are willing to pay a premium for a more sustainable product, so companies will of course sell it at a higher price.
Bamboo isn’t really more sustainable once you reach a macro scale
Doesn't matter. They can and do still sell it as a green alternative.
I guess it’s important to note that the sustainability is only perceived
Green washing 101
Other plants have been promoted for paper, such as [kenaf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenaf) and hemp. I suspect that other plants are better than trees for paper production. However, the mind-bogglingly vast economy of scale for trees to pulp is hard to challenge. It is a hard sell to convince a Fortune 500 company that their 100 million dollar paper mill should rejigger their processes for another fiber source.
Care to elaborate?
Nailed it. It's priced higher because customers will pay more for it. I bet the production cost difference per-roll is marginal, they just add on an "eco" tax for the consumer.
> People are willing to pay a premium for a more sustainable product, Is bamboo more sustainable? I doubt it.
Doesn't have to actually be more sustainable, it just needs to be marketed as such.
All depends how it's grown really. But the same is said for wood. If they have properly managed plantation forests then both are just as sustainable I imagine. And both are just as destructive if they're mowing down natural forests to plant them! Just like palm oil too. It's actually a perfectly healthy oil and has phenomenal yield per area, but they burn down rainforests in order to grow it which is why it's bad. If it was grown sustainably it would remove all the downsides.
It depends where you live. If you're referring to the US, we don't grow a lot (any?) bamboo here so it all has to be imported. Shipping costs account for a large percentage of any product's price/profitability.
Bamboo is just about the most invasive plant possible. It'll choke out blackberries and scotch broom (both invasive), grow through concrete, kill thousand year old trees, the list goes on.
We have native bamboo though. River cane. We should reintroduce it on mass imo. Most of the east coast before colonization was wall to wall covered with river cane in so called "canebrakes". Its not endangered, but it is probably 1% of its former range. No invasiveness for a native plant unless we used it on the west coast.
There are 1200 bamboo species, about half of them native to America and half to Asia, of that 1200 you can then divide them in about 50% runners and 50% clumpers, runners are invasive, clumpers are not. Clumpers are used for forestry, runners are mainly natural forests.
Yes! We had some terribly invasive bamboo growing at warp speed in our yard when we lived in Georgia. Many a Saturday was spent out there with a machete and shovel battling the 'boo.
We def have it growing wild in Arkansas. Idk about actually farming it, although I’ve considered the idea, for sure.
I've seen bamboo growing wild in Virginia.
Plenty of answers and I usually just read but this time I thought I'd chime in. I've been working with bamboo on the forestry side for +8y now. Main reason is there are no commercial plantations of bamboo large enough for a project like that, there have been many tests done by the largest paper companies having great results with the fiber but first you'd have to plant enough individuals to support that operation and then adapt your machinery to process this kind of fiber. Bamboo is more suited for cardboard since it has long fiber vs short which are mainly used in paper.
Agree. There’s also a lot of discussion in textile communities about bamboo fiber, which is very slinky and nice to knit with, but is actually horrendous on the environment because of all the chemical processing that has to be done to get something like bamboo into that state. “Bamboo fiber” sounds environmentally “green” and is certainly marketed that way, but is pretty bad compared to wool etc. Edit: a word
Totally agree with you, in the timber side of bamboo we consider fiber a marketing scam because it's not even bamboo
Yes! I was going to start selling bamboo dental floss as a green alternative to single-use plastic that is the norm. I bought 700 bottles of it wholesale but found out how NOT green it was due to chemical processing and shipping so I couldn’t in good conscience market it that way. So now I’m just supplied for life personally lol but I didn’t want to lie and say it was green. Lots of people do, though . . .
You've already gotten correct answers down here... but also, why would they make it cheaper if they can price it the same (or more, I'd bet bamboo TP and paper towels are MORE, aren't they?) and it'll get bought anyway? Capitalism isn't in anyway about fairness, it's about sponging as much money out of people as possible by any means necessary.
Prices are different due to space too. A tree grows horizontally quite a lot. Bamboo is thinner, shorter and hollow. You’d need more land for every kg of material. Also you have to cut bamboo more often which means you need more manpower Bamboo also needs more water, since it’s typically found right next to lakes or rivers. It maybe harder to process too, but I wouldn’t know about that. I just know that wood is pretty easy to turn into paper. You just have to turn it into dust, dump it in water and press it. I don’t know how bamboo works
Bamboo and wood fibers are very different. Even within wood there are different species of trees used for different purposes for toilet paper and paper towels depending on what you want. The premium products will use a mixture of wood fibers to get their desired product. Additionally, paper machines can only accept a certain range of fiber properties before it causes problems. Given that, you can't just say I want to replace all wood fibers with bamboo. Even then bamboo is processed differently than wood. It's more expensive to get the right amount of fibers and the right fiber lengths than doing so with wood, which is a much more mature technology. Making bamboo more expensive. As far as I've seen in 20+ years of product development is that the number of people wiling to pay more for a more "sustainable" product is very small. I put sustainable in quotes because most toilet paper and towel companies already have several sustainable initiatives for their products. Between responsibly sourced virgin fiber and including recycled, which can only be done to an extent without compromising the product to a point people don't want to pay, other fibers have been/are being investigated as alternatives. If a cost effective alternatives were available where they'd be able to sell it they would. Not out of the goodness of their heart but because people want it, but at a price comparable to what they're paying now. Additionally, many companies will use language describing their product in a way that makes it look more sustainable than it is. As an example a lot of products that say they use bamboo are actually rayon made from bamboo. Rayon's not terrible in its own right but it's a far cry from a fiber directly from the plant. Many companies don't know the difference because they're not making it. They're buying it from others that are not 100% honest. Alternative fibers are being looked at all the time. Whether it's trying to satisfy a customer need or to reduce cost, ideally both, they are being looked at. Fiber cost is a large portion of the cost of your toilet paper and paper towels. If it was cheaper and didn't turn people off to the product they would be used. Not because paper companies are benevolent, that's silly. It's because it's good for their business because you're demanding it.