Robbins Lumber among Maine companies beginning climate project

SEARSMONT, Maine (WABI) – The New England Forest Foundation is building a stronger community. They recently gifted six companies across the state grants with the goal of more climate-friendly forestry work. Maine’s Robbins Lumber Company was one of the businesses granted this money.

”We’re just trying to accomplish good forestry, that’s all we’re doing,” said Robbins Lumber forester Ethan Jacobs

The United States Department of Agriculture is partnering with the New England Forest Foundation to start a Climate-Smart Commodities Partnership Project. The $30 million project gives an opportunity for companies like Robbins Lumber not only to increase carbon in the forests in their area but across the state.

“It benefits the landowners, it benefits the general public, because all of these thinnings are going to be using, to make electricity,” answered Jim Robbins. Robbins now works as a consultant for the company but was an owner for many years before retiring.

Dense forests, despite having a lot of trees, supplies wood that isn’t necessarily useful. By thinning large sections of woods, this creates bigger and stronger trees resulting in more climate-friendly use out of the forests.

The climate isn’t the only thing benefiting from this project.

“Plus, it provides a lot of jobs. In rural Maine, where we need jobs, the forest industry is one of the biggest employers for the people in the state of Maine. So it really helps the rural areas,” added Robbins.

For Robbins Lumber, the hearing of the news was a mix of reactions. The money leads to more work asked of the company that deals with contractors that have to perform the labor.

“It was some mixed feelings,” said Jacobs. “At first, it’s exciting and then the other half of it is, ‘well, how are we going to pull it off?’ The biggest issue, in my opinion, is actually getting the contractor actually interested in being able to do this work.”

Despite new building technologies, Robbins Lumber claims that wood is just as important as it has ever been.

“Wood is the best product you can build anything with. We’re encouraging people to build more stuff out of wood and replacing concrete and steel which produces a tremendous amount of carbon because they have to use so much fuel to produce it. Wood uses hardly any energy at all to produce, so it helps the climate by getting the trees to grow fast, storing carbon, and providing wood for the mills so people can do more building with wood,” concluded Robbins.

At this point, the program is just entering phase one in an effort to learn more about the effectiveness of the project itself.

To learn more information about the program and the efforts of the New England Forestry Foundation, click here.

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