This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 8:24 am and is filed under Eco-Friendly Furniture, Customer Needs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
These days environmental friendliness is on many peoples’ minds. People are devising ways to create environmentally friendly everything including eco-friendly furniture. From the very beginning we here at AdenWorks have been very conscious of our carbon footprint. Although the focus on green has developed more recently, we have been creating eco-friendly rustic furniture since AdenWorks began.
Obviously this is an extremely important aspect of our company. We strive to preserve the earth as best we can by not using new teak tress to build our furniture. Instead we design our furniture to be composed of old wagon wheels, old plow handles, old feeding troughs, parts of barns, and many more antique materials. Its fun to see how create you can be when designing a piece of furniture from a trough.
I wanted to fill you in on why our furniture is eco-friendly by telling you a little bit about the history of Thailand and teak forests. Yesterday’s blog appeared quite encouraging when it came to the lush forests, but by the end of the post we realized something was amiss. Let’s continue the story today:
Sadly, by 1993 the forest area for growing teak had been reduced to only 1,880,700. What happened in such a short few years? The causes include:
• Hill tribe slash-and-burn activities
• Illegal land clearing and encroachment for agriculture
• Mining and construction of hydropower dams and reservoirs
Actually the real timber exploitation began in the mid 19th Century by foreign companies such as Borneo Company, Anglo-Thai Company and Bombay Burma Company. There were no regulations to control timber harvesting and control was left to local jurisdictions. A forest department was established in 1896 yet further exploitation was carried out using selective cutting based on the growth rates of each tree species and its marketable size limits.
In 1988 Thailand experienced a devastating flood whose impact was cataclysmic. The Thai people surmised that the cause was deforestation. As a result the government imposed an immediate band on logging in 1989. Log and lumber exports were banned in 1991. To give you an idea of its impact, wood production has declined from 1,820,000 m³ in 1983 to 65,000 m³ in 1993. In fact, Thailand imported 630,000 m³ in 1983, rising to 3,211,000 m³ in 1993. As you can see, Thailand has gone from being a net exporter to a net importer of wood due in large measure of exploitation practices begun in the mid 19th century up until 1991. This also coincided with a substantial population increase. In 1909 the population was just over 8 million people and as of 2000, the population expanded to just over 60 million people
It is clear to see that the teak forests of Thailand have sadly been reduced to a shadow of what they once were. So where does Thailand go from here. We will explore tomorrow the current status of Thailand’s teak forests.
April 29th, 2008 at 12:43 am
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May 6th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Thank you for reading our blog. I hope that this information is helpful and interesting to you at the same time. Our goal is to keep you informed about our product and furniture trends.