Arizona Forest
Restoration Products Inc.
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Arizona Forest Restoration Products Inc. |
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Why Arizona Forest Restoration Products?
A rare synergy exists for the foreseeable future that provides an exciting opportunity:
1. Due to years of forest neglect and a decade of drought, unnatural fires are destroying the American forests. During the 2000 fire season 7,393,493 acres of forest burned, the largest number on record with the Wildland Fire Statistics compiled since 1960. In 2002, not only were 7,184,712 acres destroyed, but Colorado, Arizona and Oregon recorded their largest fires in the last century. In 2003, California experienced extreme fire activity driven by the Santa Ana winds. Fifteen large fires consumed more than 750,000 acres and destroyed almost 5,000 structures. Then, during the 2004 fire season, 8,097,880 acres were destroyed; and again 8,689,389 acres in 2005; and 9,873,745 more in 2006. In 2007, statistics show that 85,705 wildfires burnt 9,328,045 acres in the United States. This is almost 1.5 million acres more than the five-year average (2003 - 2007) of 7,843,685 acres, and almost 2.5 million acres more than the ten-year average (1997- 2006) of 6,891,573 acres (National Interagency Fire Center).
2. Awareness, then acceptance, then eagerness have emerged among the various political, governmental, ecological, environmental, and educational constituencies to support taking action and thinning the forests in order to reduce the accumulation of hazardous fuels and to lower the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
3. Economic and political realities indicate that the funding necessary to conduct large scale thinning operations simply will not be provided by the Federal or State treasuries. A rational long-term forest conservation plan based on an economically self-sustainable model funded by the product of controlled small diameter harvesting must therefore be implemented.
4. After decades of development, mechanized harvesting and processing technologies have now been perfected that make it technically feasible to collect the small diameter trees harvested during thinning operations and to process them into Oriented Strand Boards (OSB), the fastest-growth construction material.
5. Other utilizations of small diameter trees harvested during thinning operations lack markets to sell to, or economic viability, and are not able to fund the thinning of the forest on a meaningful scale within the time frame realistically needed to reduce significantly the dangers caused by trees proliferation and accumulation of hazardous fuel.
6. Existing OSB manufacturing capacities are concentrated in Canada and in the Southeast U.S. with only a few OSB plants west of the Mississippi in Oklahoma and Texas, on the Arkansas and Louisiana state lines. This creates a decisive geographical competitive advantage for a plant in Arizona that will benefit from drastically lower shipping costs to the Southwest high-growth markets of Central Arizona (Phoenix), Southern California (Los Angeles, Orange County, etc.), Nevada (Las Vegas), etc.
To exploit this synergy, Arizona Forest Restoration Products (AZFRP) has been incorporated and will build an Oriented Strand Board (OSB) manufacturing plant in Northern Arizona, within immediate proximity of the forests needing to be thinned, and within close proximity of the fastest growth and largest housing construction markets in the nation.
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