Construction World November 2022

EXTERNAL FINISHES

EVA-LAST: ENVIRONMENTAL TOTHE CORE

Research has shown that the world’s two largest rainforests – the Amazon and the Congo forest – are under threat. Current rates of deforestation, even from legal logging, are unsustainable and will see two of the Earth’s most carbon storage zones lose their effectiveness within decades. The adoption of alternative construction materials to reduce demand for natural timber has become an environmental imperative.

A 30-year study published in the Forest Ecology and Management journal in September 2021 showed that the Brazilian Forest Service’s programme of forest concessions initiated in 2006 will maintain the current rate of timber production for only one harvest production. The government outlined a potential concession area in the Brazilian Amazon of 35 million hectares, but research has shown that to be sustainable, logging would need to occur at just 2% of the current rate. The study recommended that alternative sources of timber be found. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, felled timber, including hardwoods regulated by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, is exported to destinations such as Europe and the US. The trees in the Congo forest store a third more carbon per hectare than those in the Amazon and harbour endangered wildlife. However, since 2004 the government has accelerated the extension of timber transport roads into the forest to enable logging concessions, bringing with them commercial hunting, charcoal making and slash-and-burn agriculture for

one of the world’s fastest-growing populations. Elsewhere, six environmental groups are in the processes of suing the US government for allowing the logging of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, after the Trump administration amended a protection prohibiting harvesting trees of 21 or greater inches in diameter, while residents of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast in Australia are attempting to stop the state government from going ahead with allocating logging concessions in the Beerwah State Forest, which is home to threatened species. Even the Solomon Islands, a small Pacific nation made up of more than 900 islands, is at risk of losing biodiversity and ecosystems upon which citizens depend for their livelihoods thanks to aggressive logging at nearly 20 times a sustainable rate. Legal and social challenges like these show that whether or not timber is legally logged, the world’s forests are under threat and alternative materials need to be sourced. Fortunately, bamboo-plastic composite products such as those from building materials group Eva-Last

36 CONSTRUCTION WORLD NOVEMBER 2022