In Tasmania, we’re in the middle of a housing crisis. We need thousands more homes, and the timber industry stands ready to meet our ever-increasing demand for homes to live in, writes Nick Steel.
To get serious about increasing our housing stock we need to realise that forestry is key to providing new homes. All housing requires timber, and lots of it.
Environmentally friendly homes require radiata pine framing and plywood for the substrates, hardwoods for the floors, windows, doors, benchtops and stairs, MDF and chipboard for kitchen/laundry cabinets and wardrobes; and treated pine for the fences and landscaping.
That’s without even going into their furniture needs, packing boxes and paper products.
The reality is, it takes a broad mix of forestry species and a combination of processes to create the products that are required to achieve our housing targets and importantly turn that housing into our homes.
One average three-bedroom home requires 14 cubic metres of softwood and engineered timber to build the frame. To put that in perspective, we grow fifty house frames a day. That is, our Tasmanian softwood estate grows and processes enough softwood framing to build around two houses per hour.
In addition, an average house uses around 4.8 cubic metres of hardwood, plus significant volumes of ply, chipboard and MDF for the fit out.
We can do all of that with just a small footprint.
Our softwood plantation forests, which is where the framing timber comes from, is 1.09 per cent of Tasmania’s land mass. From that we harvest a mere 0.051 per cent of the total land mass annually. Doing this we grow enough timber for 18,250 house frames each year.
And that is just the frames.
Like our softwoods, hardwoods and specialty timbers also come from a small footprint of working forests. The total area harvested and regenerated per annum to fit out our homes and to supply our domestic and much of our national hardwood and specialty timber demand is 0.12 per cent of Tasmania’s land mass.
So, for total production of hardwood and softwood timber combined, we harvest (and then replant or regenerate) 0.17 per cent of Tasmania’s land mass per each year.
Our local forestry industry produces most of our housing, furniture and other wood-based products, including fibre – and there are no better alternatives to timber. Timber is a natural product and it’s renewable.
It’s a far more environmentally friendly option than carpet, vinyl and plastics, which are all full of petrochemicals and glues. They also wear out and will end up in landfill within a decade or so, where they will remain for thousands of years.
A hardwood timber floor by comparison will last a lifetime, requires only 3.5 cubic metres of timber (for an average house) and will most likely be recycled or repurposed if the house was ever dismantled. In the worst case, if disposed of, it will biodegrade and of course by then the trees used would have regrown.
It is the same for timber windows, doors, benchtops and stairs, timber is far superior to aluminium, stone or synthetic products.
Our mixed species forestry industry is critical to building the environmentally friendly homes our state so desperately needs.
The only real alternative is imported timber from places where often the forestry practices are far less regulated than here, and we do import timber. Nationally, we import around $2 billion worth of framing timber.
If Tasmania’s native timber products were to be added to the imported timber pile, instead of being produced here, that would be an additional $120 million worth of timber per annum that would have to be bought from overseas.
We need and should embrace our local forestry industry. Our critics will try to tell you otherwise, but these are the facts.
Let’s get serious about building homes in Tasmania. Let’s build them now and let’s continue to build them out of renewable, sustainable local timber.
Nick Steel is the CEO of the Tasmanian Forest Products Association.