Supporting and discouraging – using treated timber on the fire

Although there were no first-hand experiences of burning treated timber reported, participants shared their opinions about the circumstances they thought might lead to the use of treated timber for others.

A widely held view was that people would use treated timber out of ignorance. Treated timber offcuts are seen as attractive because they are free and conveniently sized and therefore do not require further chopping. The high cost of wood was given as a reason for people topping up their supplies with any free wood that becomes available no matter what its appearance. The ready availability of waste wood from commercial premises or being given away by others as a form of disposal was also mentioned as encouraging the use of treated timber, for example:

Female FG3: And people that have renovated at home. They’ll put their stuff on the front lawn with a free sign.

Male FG2: But I think that’s why a lot of people burn pallets and treated wood, it’s just convenient to pick up. Go to the local chippies who just chuck it in the bin and they can just take it out. And it’s ready for them to chuck on the fire. They don't have to split it and cart it around. And they probably don't know the difference between treated and untreated, it’s all wood to them.

Male FG2: “A lot of people can’t afford to go and get pine and what-not, so they’ve got to take what they can get and a lot of it’s off the building sites or the bins that they go to. And they probably don’t like it but they’ve probably got no choice.”

Female FG4: “Whanau pick up wood from wherever they can find it. Pallets are popular including the ones that have blue all over them.”

The view was also expressed that keeping warm for some would be more important than avoiding using treated timber - even if the consequences of burning were known.

Female FG3: “I think as times get tighter too. The economy. People are just not going to care. Their focus is: I’ve got to be warm. I’m either warm and use my fire with treated wood or my power bill goes up and I can’t afford to pay it. So I think as times become more desperate. As I said you quite often see trailer loads of pallets, and you know that they’re treated, strapped on to the trailer.”

Many focus group participants appeared to lump together all waste wood as treated wood, including pallets. Pallets are not treated with CCA, and unless painted or stained do not present a health risk when burnt. It was not clear therefore whether

motivations ascribed to people using pallets as a fire wood source would be the same as for people using CCA-treated timber. There may very well be socioeconomic reasons for using pallets, although it was noted by focus group participants that pallets are not conveniently sized for fire wood use and require the use of a skill-saw to break down and storage space. Interestingly, a lower proportion of people in the 2013 Masterton home heating survey reported using pallets compared to those who reported using decking and building offcuts, although this might reflect differences in local availability of these two wood sources.

The other key supporting factor identified was ‘ignorance’ and this could be remedied through mass media communications, education through schools and targeted

campaigns such as council road shows and displays in supermarkets.

Female FG1: Seeing it and hearing it. I think those are just the two ways you’re going to grab people. So commercials, TV, and radio. People don’t want to read but they’ll look.

Female FG3: The bad thing is, like, well we’re relatively young, but we only found out by chance that it was bad to burn treated wood. Nobody told us or educated us. And I think there needs to be some education out there.

The possibility of targeting older people who read the newspaper as a way of bringing about inter-generational education was also proposed by one participant:

Female FG1: “Wainui hard out read their newspapers and local rag or whatever. Because they want to stay informed. They would like to be informed with the

knowledge. So that would be really great because most of our olds actually read it. It will remind them to remind their mokos [children] that if this looks funny, don’t touch it.”

The place of education in schools was robustly discussed in Focus Group 2 as this was yet viewed by one participant (a teacher) as yet another pressure to be imposed on a low decile schools already inundated with responsibilities for educating children about nutrition, sun-smart etc. And in any rate “in a community like ours children don’t have the control” at home to influence wood choices.

An alternative way to discourage the use of treated timber was to provide affordable good quality wood through community wood schemes, for example a gum tree plot at the school or working bees on council-owned forestry land.

One participant saw an important step in discouraging the use of treated timber would be to reduce the supply and availability in the community by educating building firms and manufacturers to dispose of all their offcuts appropriately and to make a subsidy available for this.