The Ontario Biomass Producers Co-Op is taking steps to add some structure to their industry. The Co-op is implementing Central Desk Selling and a Check Off Collection Mechanism. The Check-Off will generate funds to promote the co-operative. Central Desk Selling is going to be used to develop an advertising strategy on behalf of the co-operative….
Pictou Landing First Nation and two other conservation groups will be splitting a $225,000 fine served to Northern Pulp on Wednesday for a 2014 effluent spill in Boat Harbour. In January, Northern Pulp pleaded guilty to a charge under the Federal Fisheries Act of illegally dumping a harmful substance (mainly pulp and paper effluent) into…
Seven Mi’kmaq First Nations have filed a lawsuit against the New Brunswick government over its forest policy and management agreements with industrial forestry companies. The chiefs contend the province’s forest strategy, management agreements, management plans and the Crown Lands and Forests Act itself amount to an unjustified infringement of their Aboriginal and treaty rights. “We will continue to…
We’re just one month into the forest fire season and the fire hazard is high across northeastern Ontario. The Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry has reported 45 fires have burned 85 hectares of land across our region so far. The region covers from Haliburton in the south, to Cochrane in the north. Many forest fires are…
Summers in Winnipeg in 2080 will be as hot and dry as they are today in the Texas Panhandle if worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions continue unabated, according to the first detailed climate-change projections conducted for the Canadian Prairies. If atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide continue to rise at the current rate, Winnipeg in 2080 would experience daily highs of 30 C or more about 46…
In the fight against climate change, forests play a critical role — drawing more greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere than they emit. But when they burn, much of those stored gases are released back into the atmosphere. So far, the fires in Fort McMurray have released the equivalent of roughly five per cent of…
The multi-billion-dollar oilsands facilities around Fort McMurray weren’t the only large industrial operations at risk when wildfires tore through the region over the past week. Alberta’s $4 billion forest products industry also felt the heat, quite literally. Two industry players in particular — Fort McMurray-based Northland Forest Products, a big sawmill operator, and Boyle-based Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries, one of Canada’s top pulp producers— suffered unspecified losses to…
There was an embarrassing moment at the beginning of PwC’s annual Global Forest, Paper and Packaging Industry Conference in Vancouver May 4 when guest speaker Michael Walton, Google’s (Nasdaq:GOOG) head of manufacturing, asked if anyone in the room could share an innovation his or her company had implemented that was a game-changer. Not a single…
The blackened landscape around Fort McMurray is far from a dead zone, despite a wildfire that has reduced more than 229,000 of hectares of boreal forest to cinders and ashes. Amid the charred skeletons of spruce and still smouldering muskeg, Alberta’s fire-loving insects are on the move. “Its really spooky if you ever go to a burn after it’s…
The city is preparing for another bug invasion. Winnipeg’s Urban Forestry Branch is conducting an inventory of Ash trees on private property in hopes of helping to prepare the city for the arrival of the Emerald Ash Borer beetle. “The Emerald Ash Borer is a destructive invasive pest that feeds on and kills all Ash…