The pine forests around Orange are popular destinations for walking, camping, mountain biking, four wheel driving, trail biking, fossicking and more. They also support a valuable industry that produces sustainable timber for Australian homes and businesses and creates thousands of regional jobs. They form part of NSW’s 230,000-hectare softwood plantation estate, which grows enough timber to build a quarter of Australia’s new homes each year.

Find out more about growing for the future in the video below.

State forests are sustainably managed for multiple uses, including environmental conservation, tourism and recreation, and renewable timber production. Timber plantations are managed on long-term cycles and for most of the plantation’s life, they are open and freely available for the community to use and enjoy. However, every 30 years or so, plantations are harvested to supply renewable timber and replanted for the future.

Harvesting is now complete

Operations to harvest and replant the pine plantations of Kinross State forest are complete.

We thank our neighbours and visitors for their patience and appreciate their assistance in maintaining a safe worksite. The area is once again open for our community to enjoy.

In total around 160,000 tonnes of renewable timber was harvested during this operation, with every tree harvested now replaced with a new seedling.

Where has the timber gone?

The typical radiata pine tree grows up to 35 metres tall and half a metre across at chest height when harvested. It takes about six of these mature radiata pine trees to make one timber house frame.

The plantations of Kinross State Forest produced around 160,000 tonnes of renewable timber products from this harvest.

While the main product to come from these plantations will be structural timber used in house framing, each tree can produce a range of different products. The narrower sections towards the top are used to create products like timber panels for kitchen cupboards and benchtops, engineered timber products and paper products.

Future operations

Some of the smaller and weaker trees may be removed or ‘thinned’ at about age 15 to allow the remaining trees more space, light and water to grow, but for the coming decades the forest will be managed for the community and open for everyone to enjoy.

In around 30 years, the trees will once again be ready to harvest, starting the cycle again for the next generation.

The Ultimate Renewable

Renewable timber sourced from sustainably managed forests is a key part of the climate solution.

Taking into account the energy required to transform raw materials into building products and the fact that timber stores carbon for the whole of the product’s life, timber has a much smaller carbon footprint than other popular building materials like steel or concrete.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes that in the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fibre or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit.

Every time a tree is harvested from a State forest pine plantation, another tree is planted in its place, making timber a sustainable, renewable resource for future generations – the ultimate renewable.

Find out more about renewable timber.