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The Boyer newsprint mill uses pine and regrowth. The Frenchpine and Auspine sawmills use existing pine plantations. The Starwood particle board mill and Wesley Vale papermill are 100 per cent plantation-based.
The Burnie papermill does not even use Tasmanian trees. Many small sawmills obtain logs from selectively logged regrowth on private land. These thousands of jobs are not in contention.
Official forestry figures show that more than 90 per cent of oldgrowth trees that are cut down end up as woodchips for export. Tasmania's four woodchip-export mills are staffed by fewer than 120 people.
Dr Abbott makes inflated claims about how much remaining oldgrowth will never be logged. Peopie should remember that we have already lost most of our original old-growth forests.
Take Eucalyptus regnans, for example. This is the tallest hardwood plant
on Earth. Less than 13 per cent of the original cover of regnans remains
as old-growth. Half of that is under threat from logging. Much of it occurs
in the Styx. Do we really want to destroy half of the last 13 per cent
of these statuesque trees to turn them into woodchips for export? And is
it really "regenerating" these giants when they are cleared and replanted
with plantations of exotic species?
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