Sawmilling Industry in State Timber Corporation

Asha Dissanayake

State Timber Corporation is a government corporation responsible for harvesting and marketing wood from State-owned forests and forest plantations. The corporation is involved in the extraction of timber from forests, conservation of such timber, maintenance of finished products, sale of logs and sawn timber.

Sawmills are the primary processor of the raw wood, logs. A sawmill take the log and turn it into a product that is desired by the secondary industry. This product is usually a board, but it could be chips, sawdust, excelsior, or even firewood. Each sawmill has their own customers. These customers are the secondary industries, they all produce different products that the consumer purchases.

Kaldemulla and Ratmalana are the major sawmills operated by the State Timber Corporation. The STC have number of sawmills all over the country. Kaldemulla Saw mill produce lumber for manufactured furniture for their own furniture show room. However in Ratmalana sawmill, saws not only STC timber they also provide services to the private customers. Furthermore there is a timber depot centre to sell the timber.

These two sawmills have horizontal band saw machines. Bandsaws are the most widely used cutting tool in the primary breakdown of logs. Band saws result in less sawdust and more lumber due to a smaller kerf.

Logs brought into the sawmill pass through a process to produce the finished product. First the logs are debarked. Removing the bark removes the dirt and debris in the bark. Next the log is cut into boards. The boards may pass through several saws, edged and cut to length to produce the finished product. Then the lumber is stacked and dried in large kilns. Boards are graded and sorted to be bundled and sold to the markets.

Proper maintenance of the bandsaw blade is very important for the efficient sawing of lumber products. Punching, tensioning, straightening, leveling, swaging, setting, and sharpening are major processes that should be carried out in bandsaw blade maintenance. In these two sawmills there are specialised saw doctors to maintain saw blades and there are automatic feed mechanism to perform saw setting. Kaldemulla and Ratmalana sawmills use two different saw setting methods.

There are so many problems associated with sawmilling and wood product manufacturing. There are environmental problems, employee safety problems and maintenance problems of both machines and workers. Sawmilling industry is a profitable industry for the State Timber Corporation. However due to political interference, inefficiency of some workers and lack of new technology the sawmilling industry in STC is not performing well.

Current status of Endangered Herpetofauna in Sri Lanka

Asha Dissanayake

Herpetofauna mean all reptiles and amphibians of a certain area. Herpetofauna constitute significant biomass, often exceeding that of all other vertebrates. They form important linkages in the ecosystem by providing dispersal mechanism for plants, form an important link in the tropic structure through predation, and form a potential prey- base themselves, contribute to environmental heterogeneity, and have key stone function in maintaining ecosystem structure and forest important symbiotic associations with an array of organism.

Sri Lanka ranks as a great herpetological paradise in the world. It is blessed with not only high amphibian and reptile diversity and endemism, but also relatively high densities of individuals interested in herpetology and publications, especially when compared with other countries in South Asia.Sri Lanka supports a high species richness and endamacity in herpertofauna, with 106 described species of amphibians and 171 described species of reptiles. Among them there are 56 reptiles and 52 amphibians are totally threatened. Yala National Park,Knuckles Range, Udawattakelle Sanctuary, Sinharaja, and Horton plains are the herpetological importance sites in Sri Lanka.

At present large scale conversion of forest areas for agriculture, plantation and settlements has put great stress on the remaining tropical forests of the country. Changing land use patterns, habitat fragmentation and habitat destruction have caused severe threats to the amphibian and reptiles. Also a combination of other factors including use of organoclorine pesticides and herbicides may have caused declining population of once abundant Herpetofauna of Sri Lanka.

Hence it is of critical importance to comprehensively identify the Herpetofauna of Sri Lanka in order to develop conservation measures which may help in encouraging ecotourism, building biodiversity database, land use planning and the production of regional and international Red Data Books of threatened species.

Potential For Gliricidia Based Dendropower In Sri Lanka

P. L. A. M. C. Wijewarnasuriya

These days Sri Lanka has been facing a power crisis. When considering the national grid, about 60% is contributed by fossil fuels. Sri Lanka does not have fossil fuel resources and being a developing country, Sri Lanka has to spend lot of money for importing crude oil and refined oil. As a result of that, Sri Lanka has to go to an alternative energy source.

About 2-3 decades ago, people thought that, by developing the hydropower projects, power crisis can be solved. But all of us had to experience power cuts about 4 years ago, due to lack of rainfall. Climatic changes can directly affect on hydropower plants. Therefore, Sri Lanka should attention on non-conventional renewable energy sources such as dendropower.

Dendropower is , energy produced by using biomass. As biomass, Gliricidia biomass can be used. Gliricidia sepium is an ideal species for generating dendropower in Sri Lanka as it is a common species which has a rapid growth rate. By maintaining Gliricidia plantations for energy production, additional benefits can also be obtained by people in rural areas. Gliricidia based dendropower is a cheap energy source compared to fossil fuels. And it is also an environmental friendly energy source.

Currently, dendropower is already used in Sri Lanka. Therefore, there is a great potential for Gliricidia based dendropower in Sri Lanka.A

Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and its Potential in Sri Lanka

M.A. Lankathilake

Between 1970 and 2004 the annual emission of CO₂ grew by about 80% and during the last century, the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere has risen by twelve fold. Due to the greenhouse gas effect, with the increase of greenhouse gases (GHG) present in the atmosphere earth’s atmosphere get warmer and warmer. This cause climate change and other related problems. In 1990 IPCC mentioned that climate change is a threat to a whole world and whole world should be joining together to solve this issue. Then the UNFCCC was established and enter into force in March 1994 .Which works with the objective of stabilizing atmospheric concentration of GHG at safe levels that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system, but this did not mentioned the quantity of the level of reduction of GHG.

Therefore in 1997 Kyoto protocol was adapted with the major objective of reduction of GHG by industrialized countries at least 5% compared to the emission levels in 1990 during the period 2008-2012.Accroding to the Kyoto protocol there are 3 mechanisms which can be use to meet the GHG emission reduction targets; Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Joint implementation (JI), International Emission Trading.

CDM is the mechanism which implementing projects in developing countries that reduce emissions of GHG or absorb GHG from the atmosphere and sell the amount avoided or absorbed to developing countries. There are 15 potential sectors for CDM listed by UNFCCC and among them the potential sectors identified for Sri Lanka are Energy, Industry, Transport, Waste management, Agriculture, Forest management, Plantations. Among these sectors almost all Sri Lankan CDM projects registered so far in the hydropower sector. But Sri Lanka also has the potential to conduct CDM projects in the other sectors also. The major issue related to CDM is lack of awareness, high cost of preparing PIN/PDD therefore high initial cost, difficulties in finding international buyers. Create an awareness programs at national levels and give an international exposure to our CDM potential and CDM projects are some of the solutions that can be given for the issues.

According to the UNFCCC statistics it shows that the India and China get more benefits than Sri Lanka.CDM is the one of the best mechanism that can be implementing in our country as a developing country to contribute to the reduction of Global warming.