Carbon Storage

At the Mystery Creek National Fieldays late last year the first ever Forestry Hub featured a cubic metre of pine timber block at the front entrance. It attracted a lot of attention. The idea was to show off the amount of carbon trees take out of the atmosphere to combat climate change. Half of the cube is carbon – all safely out of the atmosphere.  

Cutting a cube that big turned out to be rather a job. First Manulife had to find a tree large enough in their forests but which could be safely felled. They eventually found a 60-year-old at one of their blocks at Lichfield which was right next to the road so it could be trucked away. Big as it was, its girth was not enough to cut a regular square cube. You’d have to find a pine tree more than 100 years old for that.

Expert treefeller TJ Thompson was called in to bring the tree down – the biggest pine he’d ever put the chainsaw to. Radio New Zealand agriculture reporter Susan Murray came along to record the event. Everyone had to wait two hours for the mist to clear enough to take video as well.

Then the guys at Putaruru Portable Sawmillers took over. Carefully measuring out a cube metres long to get exactly one cube of volume. They’d never done a job like that before either. They got it slightly wrong the first time up. Fortunately, TJ had cut off enough tree for another attempt. PPS got it spot on next time around.

Then at the Fieldays the cube was on display. There are 530 million such cubes of wood making up trees in the national pine forest estate. In fact, our plantation pines are growing an additional ten million tonnes of carbon into their wood every year. That is re-absorbing most of the carbon Aotearoa New Zealand emits into the atmosphere every year.