A giant timber Jenga game at London’s Victoria station this week kicked of a consumer campaign from the Wood Panel Industries Federation (WPIF) aimed at building opposition to subsidy for UK wood-fuelled power generation.
The campaign, Stop Burning Our Trees (SBOT), grew out of the WPIF’s Make Wood Work campaign, which targets business and political decision makers.
The Jenga display was intended to “stop commuters in their tracks” so they would see posters and leaflets highlighting the threat to both the timber industry, particularly the panels sector, and the environment posed by subsidies for electricity generators which encourage them to use UK-grown wood for fuel. They were also encouraged to sign an online petition at www.stopburningourtrees.org.
The launch event lasted a day, but is being followed for several weeks by London bus and underground advertising directing people to the website. Trees at strategic sites around the city will also be ‘wrapped’ in campaign material.
The WPIF says that there should be a hierarchy of wood use, with the first priority being timber products which lock in its carbon content long term. It maintains that subsidy for large power plants enable them to pay more for wood fibre, threatening wood-processing businesses and “thousands of jobs” and also says the domestic UK wood resource is “insufficient for large-scale electricity” generation.
“We’ve also calculated that CO2 emissions could increase by 6 million tonnes a year if government continues to put resources into biomass power stations to the point where our industry is displaced,” said WPIF director-general Alastair Kerr. “We are asking the public to question whether it’s better in the first instance to burn wood inefficiently and lose all the benefits in an instant, or make something from it and maximise the economic and carbon benefits of this unique resource.”
The SBOT campaign is also using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and will hold an MPs’ reception at Westminster on November 22.
