Wrong hemisphere, wrong mills

THE current Pulp Mill Task Force trip to Finland is a junket to the wrong hemisphere visiting the wrong pulp mills. The pulp mills to be visited make a poor comparison to the current Gunns pulp mill proposal. This will only add to a misleading and confusing PR campaign being run in Tasmania.

The Wilderness Society is opposed to any pulp mill in Tasmanian that uses native forests and chlorine bleaching because it will drive ongoing forest destruction in Tasmania and pollute both the air and marine environment.

We saw it with the Pulp Mill Bus and now we are seeing it with this Taskforce junket. Misspent money and blinkered, misguided information that will once again leave the Tasmanian community with their questions unanswered.

This is highly deceptive. There are fundamental differences between the mills being visited in Finland and Gunns’ proposal. Differences extend from age of mill, feedstock, size, power source, and adjoining papermaking operations, and these affect the impacts on both community and the environment in a very different way to what we may see in Tasmania.

If this trip was serious they would compare apples with apples. The most comparable pulp mills to the Tamar Valley proposal are modern mills located in South America, which are fed from vast estates of eucalypt plantations.

This Task Force needs to visit Brazil, Uruguay and Valdivia in Chile. Then they can report home a different story of community opposition to mill construction, pollution and a recently built mill that suspended operations because of environmental impacts. Its effluent poisoned a wetland and decimated a population of black necked swans.

Feedstock is a fundamental difference between Finnish mills and Gunns’ proposal. The mills visited by the Task Force are not eucalypt-based. Softwood, much of it from Russia, is shipped in from afar.

The Tasmanian community has long called for the protection of oldgrowth and high conservation value forests. The Finns have little oldgrowth left and are far removed from the coalface of the forest destruction that feeds the mill. Consider the difference in community perceptions involved.

There is, however, one similarity. Finland, like Australia, has a forestry standard for industry certification that has widely been condemned by environmental groups around the globe.

Vica Bayley is the Wilderness Society’s Tasmanian Forest Campaigner.

Read for yourself:

Chileans Upset over Dead Swans, Some Blame Pulp Mill
http://www.waterconserve.info/articles/reader.asp?linkid=37870

Pulp Friction
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1550953,00.html#article_

There’s something stinking in southern Chile
http://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin/83/Chile.html

Contamination from a pulp mill causes death in the wetlands
http://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin/89/Chile.html