Gunns, Part 2

As well as the political concerns I have over the Gunns pulp mill (see previous post), I also have a few environmental concerns. As I mentioned before, the RPDC found holes in the Gunns IIS. They failed to address the environmental issues adequately.

First of all, this is a pulp mill. That means it will be using a lot of wood, turning it into pulp. At the moment, Gunns is a huge exporter of woodchips. These woodchips mostly go to Japan, and are then turned into pulp and paper. When Gunns first put this proposal up, I think they said that the wood supply for the mill would come from the woochips that are now being exported. That would be fantastic – there would be no more wood taken from the forests than is already being harvested. In that case, the mill would definitely be a good thing. After all, if the Japanese can buy our wood chips and turn them into pulp or paper then why can’t we do it? Exporting wood chips just seems silly to me – almost a criminal waste of our forest resources. Logging of old-growth forests for woodchipping just seems so wrong. But since then, I’ve heard that they are not planning to phase out wood chipping in favour of supplying the pulp mill. The latest plans, apparently, are to continue exporting wood chips as well as taking extra wood from the forests to supply the new mill. That would mean that they could potentially double the amount of wood being harvested. If that’s true, I think that would definitely be unsustainable. I’ll have to try and find a reference for that, though – I remember hearing that this was the plan, but can’t remember where I heard it.

Other issues include the treatment of effluent from the mill. The plan is to build a pipeline three kilometers out into Bass Strait. This will have the effect of dumping a lot of waste water into a fairly pristine area, and a prime fishing ground. There’s also been a study done that shows this area of Bass Strait is one of the slowest areas in the strait to be flushed clean, which means that any toxins etc in the effluent will be concentrated here for quite some time. This doesn’t sound like the best possible environmental standard to me.

I’ve been in a few pulp and paper mills over the last few years. They are smelly places. I haven’t yet seen a pulp mill that doesn’t have odour problems. Gunns says that this mill wont have an odour problem because of the technology they will be using. That seems a bit optimistic to me. The best systems can fail, and have weaknesses. This is one of the issues that the IIS given to the RPDC failed to address. There will be leaks, there will be failures, and odour will get out. In a remote area this wouldn’t be a problem, though. The gases aren’t poisonous, or anything like that. They just smell bad. If there was a large distance between the mill and anything else, that would be fine. One of the main concerns here is that the mill is going to be a few kilometers downwind of Launceston – a city that already has air quality issues due to a winter inversion layer. Adding anything else to the air in that part of the world just adds to the problems of the city. I don’t think enough attention has been paid to this – and it’s a real concern to people living in the area.

Then there are concerns about access to the mill site. Many, many log trucks will have to travel to and from the mill every day. Roads in Tassie already feel clogged by log trucks, and this can be a menace. Roads can be narrow, and winding, and adding a lot of trucks to the roads can be dangerous. The mill is being built in an area with no other way for logs to be brought in except by road. It would have made more sense, I think, to build it at a location with rail access, so that the number of log trucks on the access roads could be reduced.

Anyway, on environmental grounds, I think this is the wrong mill in the wrong place. I don’t think the technology they will be using is as good as they claim. I don’t think they’ve chosen the best possible location. And I don’t think they have any plans for a sustainable wood supply – they just plan to keep clearfelling any and all forests they can access to use for wood chips and pulp.

Overall, I think a new pulp and/or paper mill in Tasmania would be a great idea. Forest-based are great industries. If they’re done well, they are sustainable forever – after all, trees do keep growing. Well-managed forest industries would be a great part of Tasmania’s clean and green image. When I first heard of the proposal I was a supporter. But Gunns, and the government, have lost my support. I think this project will be bad for the Tasmanian environment, and will be bad for the image of the state. It’s too big, in the wrong place, doesn’t seem to use the best available technology, and I don’t trust Gunns to have any concern for environmental issues. This pulp mill will go ahead, but I don’t think that’s a good thing anymore.


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