Wildstone builds its course the green way

The Kootenay News Advertiser
by Kerstin Renner

The construction of the first of two 18-hole Gary Player golf courses is well underway and things are buzzing around the Wildstone housing development at the northwest side of Cranbrook,  Cleared wood waste is piling up on the property, but instead of burning the branches and stumps, Havaday Developments thought of a better way of dealing with them,

The wood waste left by logger Pete Savarie is scooped up by big machinery right on site and thrown into a giant chipper.  The chunks are filled into large transport trucks and shipped to the Co-Gen plant in Skookumchuk.

The system is a cooperation between several groups.  The logger on the Wildstone project has been working on falling the trees since January.  Tembec brought its big chipper – a machine purchased in 2002 – right up to the site and Glen Transport makes sure the hog fuel, as the chips are also called, is taken to the Tembec facility in Skookumchuk where it is burnt to produce electricity and supply steam for the production process at the pulp mill.

All the players are convinced they are doing the right thing.  Havaday Chief Operations Officer Jay Savage says it makes sense to turn the waste into energy rather than smoke.  “We’re polluting the environment enough in this world, we don’t need to keep adding to it,” adds Mike Baden, Wildstone’s Golf Development Coordinator.

Baden explains it was an easy decision to go with the more time and cost intensive process of chipping, even if it would be considerably easier to just pile it up and burn it.  Last week, crews had chipped and removed about 2,600 tons of chips, states Tembec’s Manager of Fibre Procurement, Wayne Mercer.  At the end of the project, he estimates, about 3,000 tons will have been taken care of.

This amount translates into about 100 truck loads, says Shane Stewart, General Manager of Glen Transport.  He knows that is enough to keep the pulp mills going for several days.  “It’s a fantastic project,” Stewart raves.  Tembec has worked on other similar projects and Mercer says they are certainly looking forward to building on this experience.