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, in 2002 a total of 88,458 forest fires burned roughly 7 million acres in the West and caused the deaths of 23 firefighters. In 2003 a total of 59,149 forest fires burned 3.8 million acres in the West, destroyed 6,800 structures, and caused the deaths of 28 firefighters. Every year since, millions of acres of Western forest have burned, causing untold ecologic and economic disaster to the local communities. Comparative statistics from January 1st to August 30th indicate that 2006 is trending to be the worst year since the turn of the millennium with, year to date, 78,948 fires in the West having so far burned 7,599,563 acres.
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 (Arizona Forest Restoration Products) 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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