Burnt timber samples salvaged from Kangaroo Island have been sent to mills in the Green Triangle to determine their suitability to meet a shortage of structural pine in the building sector. If the timber is considered suitable, Kangaroo Island Plantation Timber expects to deliver an estimated 300,000 tonnes of wood to the mills. Source: Timberbiz
The timber shortage has been caused by lack of imported product, bushfire damage to local stock and demand driven by the HomeBuilder scheme.
Timber supplier Big River told its South Australian customers in February advising it was prioritising “regular volume customers” and would be unable to supply new customers on “critical stock.”
Kangaroo Island Plantation Timber managing director Keith Lamb has estimated there is enough structural timber on the island to build about 10,000 new homes.
“We’ve done all the technical specifications on the logs so they know what the quality is like and also the impact of the fire damage,” Mr Lamb said.
“Hopefully next week we’ll get a response from them to say they are willing to take the logs and what price, so we’ll negotiate a price, and then we’ll start delivering them.”
About half of the island’s 1.3 million tonnes of pine was blackened by fire but the quality of timber inside the log remains unaffected.
“We think about 20 per cent, which is very conservative, of the 1.3 million tonnes is of sufficient quality to go into the structural market. Of that, you get a 40 per cent recovery, so we think that out of the 1.3 million, there’d be about 100,000 tonnes for timber for homes, which is about 10,000 homes.”
Mr Lamb estimated it would take about 12 months to transfer the estimated 300,000 tonnes of available usable pine from the island.
“This is a one-off opportunity to get an additional volume of timber into the South Australia mainland market for construction at a time where there’s a historic shortfall on timber availability,” he said.
Mr Lamb said once the mills gave their approval the next major hurdle into restocking the building industry would be increasing mill production capacity to meet demand.
