[As published in May/June BayBuzz magazine.]
Pan Pac Forest Products’ Sustainability Report will be released mid-May.
The company has a huge impact economically in Hawke’s Bay (see sidebar at end). And with that comes a major environmental footprint. Their Sustainability Report indicates how the company seeks to meet its stewardship responsibility.
This is Pan Pac’s first sustainability report since 2022 pre-Cyclone Gabrielle. Managing Director Tony Clifford says it captures projects that have been underway for years. “What’s great about this report is we’re condensing all the sustainability initiatives we’re already doing. We’ve been doing sustainability for years.”
Although the report addresses a full range of social, cultural and staff well-being issues, we’ve focused on a number of key environmental projects that captured our attention.
Shredded wood
Trialling the use of shredded wood to pave forestry roads is one innovation.
Damon Wise, Operations Manager with Pan Pac, has been leading this project with support from the Forest Growers Research Fund. It has come out of Cyclone Gabrielle and has been trialling the use of shredded wood taken from unmerchantable logs, slash and other forest waste, to pave roads in Hawke’s Bay forests.
Using a self-propelled–tracked machine, branches and debris are turned into shredded wood, explains Wise. “Roads are then paved 500mm thick with the matt-orientated shredded wood binding together with compaction.”
One forest where the new roading system could have a huge impact is a 650 hectare forest near Frasertown, Wairoa. “It has 26 tributaries exiting the forest joining into two significant waterways,” explains Wise. “Hawkes Bay Regional Council has supported the Resource Consent application to shred all the forest’s biomass and use it on the roads and landings so that nothing post-harvest can enter a waterway and leave the forest.”
And that is the ultimate goal of the shredded road trials: to see if shredded roads can remove all forest residues from harvesting that create negative downstream impacts, while providing forest owners with economic benefits associated with roading costs.
Pan Pac plans to use shredded wood for short stub roads to skids, on haul tracks, landings and carparks and other areas either too wet or uneconomical to hold traditional materials. If the ground is too steep shredded roads won’t work and if mud is tracked onto the wood road, it can get slippery. “Then you have to put a running coat of metal on top,” says Wise.
Biomass
Pan Pac knows biomass! For the last 45 years Pan Pac has been collecting sawdust, bark, wood shavings and timber offcuts from its forests to fire two boilers at its Whirinaki-based plant. These boilers in turn provide steam to the kilns and pulpmill for drying lumber and pulp. Currently the boilers burn approximately 220,000 tonnes of biomass per year – enough to bury Napier’s Mclean Park complex in a pile 30 metres high.
Clifford is aware creating more biomass for electricity generation could be part of both its and Hawke’s Bay’s future.
“The price of wholesale electricity just keeps growing and we are considering if we can use more biomass to generate electricity,” says Clifford. “At the moment we can generate up to about 10% of our electricity needs. When we have our boilers running at maximum capacity we have additional heat (steam measuring 7-800 degrees centigrade) that we use through our turbine.”
The turbine runs on steam producing a maximum of 13 megawatts of electrical power at any one time. To note though, the turbine suffered significant damage during Cyclone Gabrielle and is still being repaired to the tune of $6 million, for a re-launch later this year. But Clifford says the turbine rebuild is a part of Pan Pac’s commitment to energy sustainability.
Pan Pac is also working with the HB Forestry Group to see if biomass can be used across the Hawke’s Bay region. “We have a surge capacity and we could distribute biomass out. If, for example, schools got involved and stopped using coal-fired heating systems then they could use biomass. But that would create a big demand in winter and then what would we do with biomass at other times of the year?
“There are complexities with collecting biomass,” he adds. “It has to be clean, no dirt. If you put dirt into a boiler, for example, it will stop working within about six months. You have to be careful storing it too. If you store biomass for too long it starts to self-compost and it can heat up and catch fire.”
There is also the question of transporting biomass. Burning biomass has about the equivalent CO2 emission rate as keeping it on the ground, so the cost of transporting it and the CO2 emissions that will incur, have to be weighed up against using another fuel. The sweet spot for Pan Pac is transporting biomass for about 50 -70 kilometres max. from where it is collected.
Pan Pac is also interested to see if treated timber, used across Hawke’s Bay, could be used as biomass and is hoping to conduct trials with the HB Regional Council soon.
“We’ve been handling and converting biomass for a long time so it’s logical we can help others in the region,” concludes Clifford. “It is definitely an opportunity we are watching closely.”
Rock Station
Another big gain in Pan Pac’s commitment to sustainability was the purchase last year of Rock Station – a 627-hectare property at Te Pohue that contains a 31-hectare block of remnant native forest with a QEII covenant on it.
Environmental Manager Reece O’Leary has worked with local iwi and mana whenua to identify important sites on the property. Deer have been culled from the native forest and possum and pest traps have been set. Pan Pac has also finalised a new policy to double setback limits, which means no planting of pines or forestry operations within 10 metres of wetlands and waterways (national regulations require five metres).
O’Leary is working on public access to the Te Pohue property so that tramping groups and other interested parties can get up to Te Waka Range and its magnificent views. An area near the top of the range has been identified as a site to grow myosotis peteolata (native forget me knot). One of these plants was identified on a neighbouring property and Marie Taylor of Plant Hawke’s Bay has been growing plants from collected seed which will be planted over winter. Natives sourced from local nurseries will supplement the native bush area.
Rock Station is the second Pan Pac property to have a QEII covenant. The Fisher Block just north of the Whirinaki Mill, now called Pākuratahi Bush, has a 68ha native block within its total area of 298ha. Input from the HBRC, local mana whenua and the QEII National Trust contributes to the management of the site.
O’Leary sees the two QEII covenants as good news in the current political climate questioning farms converted to forestry, and he points out that across all Pan Pac forests from Wairoa to Gwavas there are 5,000 hectares of native forest.
“Most people look at Pan Pac and say you guys grow pines, but we’re a lot more than that.”
Fish pass
Another Pan Pac win for sustainability has been creating a fish pass on Tamingimingi Stream on the Pākuratahi block. After Cyclone Gabrielle, a flow monitoring weir needing repairing, at the same time migratory fish like inanga and bullies needed help navigating up stream. So a project involving NIWA, Australian fish passage services, HBRC, and led by Pan Pac fresh water ecologist Dan Fake, was launched with a fish pass designed by Australian fish passage services.
“The design both caters for the swimming capabilities of native fish, and ensures resilience to flood events by embedding boulders into the stream bed,” says Fake. He explains an excavator was used to carefully place the boulders into the stream in rows that create “steps” and resting pools for the fish. Smaller fill material was then placed and compacted in the bed to fill in the gaps and further secure the boulders.
“The stream was monitored using electric fishing before the fish pass was installed. The monitoring will be re-done next summer which will allow for spring migration of juvenile fish from the sea.”
Other initiatives
And if all that wasn’t enough, there is more to Pan Pac’s sustainability programme: Forests are being made more resilient with better water flow management, including building and re-building bridges and culverts. Efforts are going on to protect the threatened Kārearea (native falcon) in Pan Pac forests. The company is also partnering with Essity Australasia providing pulp for its eco- tissue production at Kawerau paper mill in the Bay of Plenty, and is providing timber to Auckland-based company Abodo which is making pest traps for use back on Pan Pac’s QEII covenanted land.
And one project that might not make this year’s report but is special is a new community-based native nursery being established on site at Whirinaki. “It’ll grow 10,000 seedlings a year,” says Environmental Manager Reece O’Leary. “We’re just getting it built and we’ll be producing plants next year, which will all go back into the Esk Valley.”
A big win surely, for Pan Pac, the local community and Hawke’s Bay.
Emissions profile
Pan Pac’s emissions are independently audited by Toitu, most recently just prior to the cyclone. At that point, annual emissions totalled 270,000 tCO2e per year; these were offset by forest sequestering of about 1,200,000 tCO2e per year, so their net carbon position was approximately 930,000 t CO2e of absorption/sequestration per year to the good.
Pan Pac has achieved Bronze status under Toitu’s standards for its environmental management performance.
Says Managing Director Tony Clifford, “We are still actively working towards reducing our site greenhouse gas emissions, but the cyclone has put us back two years in progress. We were in the process of increasing our certification level to Toitu Silver or Gold just prior to the cyclone and will reestablish this aspiration now that we are back to full operations.”
BayBuzz will report future progress.
PAN PAC BASICS
Direct workers (2020): 833 FTEs – 1.1% of HB’s FTEs
Total employment impact: 3,250 – 4.1% of HB’s FTEs
Total impact on HB GDP: $541 million – 6.3% of HB GDPOne-third of Napier Port volume
Total tax revenues generated: $135 million
Total forest area in HB: 36,000 ha.
Annual harvest & replant: About 1,000 ha/yr
Cost of Cyclone Gabrielle: $300 million
Pan Pac Environmental Trust: Grants $100,000 per year to community projects
