Jun 20 2007
New environmentally friendly timber processes for delivering sustainable, technically superior and innovative timber products.
Australian Choice Timber Supplies has by innovation and its major R&D programs taken a massive step towards making solar drying kilns best-practise technology for drying materials, particularly timber products on a global basis.
The patented technology, known as “solarola drying kiln” technology has many unique attributes along with its greatly improved low-cost and exceptional and simple solar heat collection system.
Combined with highly developed modified drying schedules that cycle kiln conditions with daily solar cycles, the combined low cost and superior energy efficiency of the technology underpins its amazing success.
Since drying of materials represents one of the world’s biggest energy consumers and contributors to greenhouse emissions and global warming, it is clear that this technology is set to become another major Australian success story when it becomes globally known and embraced as best practise.
Another product also has strong potential to be a world-class success story. ACTS was approached in 2006 by representatives of the United Nations and Department of Ozone and heritage (Australia) to develop an environmentally safe technology for heat treating timber and other products for phytosanitary control.
Phytosanitary control basically involves killing insects and pathogens that may be contained by products being shipped from one country or region to another. The process avoids some of the catastrophic results we have had in the past from introduced pests and hazards into new environments.
Where industrial scale does not allow for the option of using large, high capital-cost gas kilns to “heat treat” products as a means of killing insects and pathogens, the established process is to expose timber and other products to very nasty ozone depleting methyl bromide gas in a way that trades off one environmental problem for another.
Methyl bromide gas is dangerous to humans and even more dangerous to the environment as one of the worst ozone-depleting gases that man has devised. This gas is being, or already has been phased out in most countries around the world.
ACTS has developed a solar heated fully sustainable heat-treatment kiln based on the innovative practical design of its more complex full-specification kiln units.
The first prototype unit, purchased by the Department of Ozone and Environment in Fiji is being trialed in Fiji in May 2007.