SUSTAINABILITY

We strive to earn our social license by communicating openly and frequently with community leaders and nearby stakeholders, sharing our private properties with the general public, and treating our employees, contractors, customers, suppliers, and everyone else with decency, respect, and fairness at all times. Our properties are among the most publicly accessible forests in the world.

During forest management activities, we prioritize harvesting the worst trees first (to capture their value before they die), spacing the crowns of residual stems (to allow the residual trees to grow better), maintaining or enhancing diversity (to increase the resilience of the forest despite pests and inclement weather), and protecting wildlife habitat (to ensure the non-human residents of the forest can keep living there, too).

The vast majority of our forestry operations utilize tree marking and partial harvest systems like single-tree selection. Tree marking is the act of inspecting each and every tree in the forest before making any decisions about which trees will be cut and which will be protected. Partial harvest systems entail cutting approximately 30% of the trees during each harvest, meaning that plenty of stems are retained to provide seed, shelter, and continued growth. With the use of these systems, harvests are able to re-occur every 20 years, with the volume, quality, and value of the timber typically improving with each successive harvest.

We complement our forest management operations with in-house research activities which occur in partnership with research institutions like the University of Toronto, Queens University, Fleming College, Hocking College, and more. Over the course of 30 years, Haliburton Forest & Wild Life Reserve Ltd. has emerged as one of the most intensively studied forests in the world. Recent studies have assessed the population dynamics of Eastern red-backed salamanders in recently harvested forests, the rate at which lake ice is changing due to climate change, and the age at which Hard maple trees reach financial maturity in the Algonquin Region of central Ontario – and much, much more.

Our sawmilling operations focus on maximizing the recovery of lumber from each sawlog by using a combination of operator training and optimization technology. We believe that it is our ethical duty to recover the most valuable products from each tree – after all, the tree spent a long time growing itself. There is no “waste” of any kind inside our sawmills: the lumber is used for furniture, flooring, railway ties, pallets, and many more products; the residues are used for paper, particle board, food products, mulch, and of course biochar.

Our biochar production systems are closed-loop, meaning that there is no “waste” of any kind being released into the environment. All of our operations are compliant with the relevant environmental regulations. Similar to the hardwood sawmills that focus on maximizing the recovery of lumber, our biochar production system focuses on maximizing the recovery of biochar while achieving the biochar characteristics required by our customers.