A common but often unmet community need in the years following a bushfire, including (but not limited to) the many fires that burned during Australia’s Black Summer, is the multitude of on-farm plantations, windbreaks and woodlots that are killed by the fire, but left standing because of the prohibitive cost to property owners of removing them.

Thanks to a bit of creative thinking, we here at Treecovery have come up with a creative solution to this problem and in doing so, we’re encouraging people to remove the term “waste” from their vocabulary. Thanks to a Commonwealth Black Summer Bushfire Recovery grant, we are engaging local contractors to fell, transport and process the logs from a number of affected Adelaide Hills properties.

We’re going to be pursuing a number of avenues to convert this valuable resource into a range of useful products. The last thing we and many other fire-affected residents of the Hills want to see is all this timber just going up in smoke for a second time! Any part of the tree that is not suitable for milling into usable timber – and you’d be surprised just how much good timber we’re getting from these trees! – will be processed into chips and it is our hope that this vast quantity of biomass will be converted into biochar, locking in the carbon and avoiding a significant volume of CO₂ ending up in the atmosphere.