These seem to be ordinary birch logs, cut into short chunks, sporting a top crosscut loaded with fire starter:
The front of the label makes them seem wonderfully eco-friendly, but the fine print on the back shows that they’re from the Old World:
There’s surely a universe where shipping heat-treated firewood from Estonia to Poughkeepsie makes perfect sense. I just didn’t realize I was living in it.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
20 responses to “Eco-Friendly Firewood?”
They’re not shipping the wood from Estonia to Poughkeepsie, they’re shipping the holes and the wood’s just packaging ;-)
Well played, sir!
I “love” the Proposition 65 warning. That initiative did wonders to get people blase about chemical exposure… When I was in Cali, some wiseguy was considering initiative to do warnings on the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide. Might have passed, too. [grin]. (I’m now wondering who bankrolled 65. Perhaps Acme Hazardous Waste Removal?)
The scary part about that is not that people fall for it, but that they fall for it every time…
Well, there is such a thing as dilutional hyponatremia… ;)
You can drink yourself to death with water, but it requires serious dedication …
The shipping probably makes sense because all production is done at cheaper labour rates and enormous amounts in Estionia and everything that happens after that is shipping with huge containers crossing the Atlantic in the slow lane.
Not to mention, Estonia must have the Mother Lode of birch trees and fire starter.
Maybe “used to have” after we finish burning it… in an ecological manner, of course. [sigh]
And they’re shipping most of their peat to Western Europe. Some fragments that might be of interest to English speakers around 8:00, 15:20 and 19:00.
I still wonder what is the Proposition 65 good for. Since the warning is on next to everything, it is, effectively, meaningless. Well, sorry, yes, I missed the obvious: the only meaning it has is that the product with the warning is sold in CA, USA. That’s about it. Whoever came up with that idea was rather naive about certain things.
Oh, no, they knew exactly what they were doing. Those unintended consequences came along for free, as they always do: there’s no penalty for displaying a warning and a huge liability for not doing so, rendering all the labels meaningless.
But, of course, you can’t simply turn off a law that doesn’t do any good.
Almost all of the plywood at my local hardware store has little stickers saying “Product of Ukraine.” Which is crazy; we have two national-size plywood mills about a hundred miles away. Even if the plywood was free, I don’t see how they could ship it from Ukraine competitively… though it might help explain the 500% price increase over the last 20 years.
If you’re going to bring in foreign plywood, I hear they do a bit of that sort of thing up in Canada…
Why am I suddenly imagining a Ukrainian at the local hardware store complaining about plywood “made in USA”?
I’m not from Ukraine and I haven’t checked the plywood supply recently, but here in Belgium the pine-tree planks I buy for projects around the house are from FSC-certified forests in Brazil.
There’s a World Cup joke in there somewhere, but it eludes me.
That’s what makes me wonder: I can’t follow the money in some of these transactions.
Like being able to order something from China for a total delivered price that’s a fraction of what I’d pay just to return it…
Postal prices and services aren’t quite reciprocal. The shipping services (and rates) available in China for shipments to the “western” world aren’t available anywhere in said western world. Their volumes are such that they can really optimize things and leverage their cheap labor and extensive logistical capability. They ship here way more than we ship there, I think.
I’d like to understand more about how all those shipping containers get to the right place at the right time: the Pacific must be covered with container ships deadheading empties back to China…
Well, I don’t know about empties (but it’d certainly partially explain higher prices), but here’s a map of shipping lanes around th world.
I’ve been researching buying a used container for our robotics team to use for storage. Apparently, there is a market here for containers that have been used once to get from there to here, and are then sold here. So it may not even be economical to send back empty containers.