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There are no parts of a tree that can be thrown away. We can use fallen trees as energy sources without wasting any parts.

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Tatsuo Kobayashi, an official at the Hobetsu processing center of the Tomakomai wide-area forestry cooperative in Mukawa, Hokkaido. Three months after an earthquake devastated parts of Hokkaido, the Hokkaido government, local forestry cooperatives and paper-manufacturing companies plan to cooperate with each other to use fallen trees in making the shift to renewable energies by turning them into fuel for stove heaters and biomass power generation, as well as making paper and lumber from them.

© Yomiuri Shimbun

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5 Comments
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There are no parts of a tree that can be thrown away. 

All parts of a tree can be thrown away. Who translated that? Or was Kobayashi trying to speak English? How about "No parts of a tree should be thrown away."

5 ( +5 / -0 )

Agree this is pretty garbled, and as is often the case, stripped clean of the necessary context to say much of anything.

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can - have to be

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I'm pretty sure most branches of sugi trees just get lopped off by woodcutters and left on the forest floor to rot. Processing tree roots is also hellish expensive, the landslides will have uprooted entire trees, and is more of a disposal problem than a "use as a resource" problem.

Since this was a natural disaster, the government will be paying for cleanup, which means that processing/disposal of fallen trees will not have to be done in an especially cost-effective manner. At present Japan imports lots of paper pulp and lumber and leaves its own thinnings on the forest floor. It is often not cost-effective to collect them, even as firewood/biomass for heating. I say to emphasize the point that not all eco-sounding initiatives are actually eco.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

While this sounds innovative, quite a few towns in Japan already do this. I know of a town nearby in which all public buildings are heated (and cooled in summer) with 100% biomass (waste wood). The idea came from Europe.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

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