BioRegional Charcoal Company Ltd

•Introduction 'network production'
•Coppice woodland management
•Charcoal Market Place
•BioRegional Charcoal Company (BRCC) is born
•The FSC logo
•A success
•BRCC has a positive impact - the facts & figures
•Regional scale charcoal plant
•Government targets
•International charcoal supply - the local network
approach
•The South African opportunity

Introduction – ‘network production’
With the growth of the global market, businesses operating in forestry, agriculture and manufacturing have become ever larger and more centralised, to benefit from economies of scale. Likewise, the retail sector is increasingly dominated by a handful of national chains. Up against this gigantic machine it may seem hard to make alternative, local supply structures work. BioRegional Development Group created a BioRegional network of producers supplying local barbecue charcoal to outlets of national retailers, such as B&Q, across the UK.

Our network combines the benefits of local supply with national co-ordination and marketing. We are convinced that this form of industrial organisation – network production – could be applied to a range of industries, making local production part of the mainstream. Our local charcoal scheme is substituting for imports from developing countries. We recognise this has implications for international development but suggest that international trade should be geared primarily towards high value products. This allows countries to generate foreign exchange whilst reducing any contribution to global warming from long-distance transport.

Coppice woodland management
Although the UK has a very good tree-growing climate, we import the bulk of our wood products. Neglected woodlands in the UK should be a local source of sustainable wood. In the past, many of the UK’s woodlands were managed for wood using techniques such as coppicing , an ancient management technique in which trees are cut back to a stump and allowed to send up a number of new shoots. Cutting back these trees every 7 to 30 years provides a sustainable harvest of wood, creating what are known as semi-natural woodlands. The harvested wood can be used for a wide range of products including furniture, fencing, firewood and charcoal.

Why is coppicing so good for wildlife?
In effect, coppicing mimics the natural woodland process of "gap formation" where old trees die and fall naturally or are blown over by gales, leaving sunny areas where young trees can take hold. Coppiced woodland has areas of sun and shade, offering a diversity of habitats for wildlife. In the first few years after cutting, woodland flowers such as violets and vetches flourish, stimulated by the light and warmth. These flowers in turn support a variety of insects, notably woodland butterflies.

As coppices grow into thickets they become home to a second generation of species, such as nightingales, turtle doves and dormice. Mature coppices become suitable for a third generation of species, such as flycatchers. Areas within a coppice which are left untouched, such as on steep banks, become overgrown and dark, forming habitats for species which thrive in deep shade including ferns, mosses and beetles.

So, although it may seem odd and counterintuitive at first, harvesting wood, if done in the right way, can be positively beneficial for wildlife and increase biodiversity. Some species in the UK are now dependent on coppicing to maintain viable populations. The beautiful pearl-bordered fritillary, the UK’s fastest declining butterfly species, is one example of a species that has become locally extinct as coppice woodlands have fallen into neglect.

Coppicing has other benefits. Growth in woodland clearings is very vigorous and so harvesting wood can increase not only its biodiversity but also its biological productivity. Coppicing therefore is one form of productive land management that is sustainable in the widest definition of the term.

Over the past 20 years, conservation groups such as Butterfly Conservation and The Wildlife Trusts, have been promoting coppicing in nature reserves purely for its biodiversity benefits. However, being dependent on volunteers or grant funding to pay for coppicing, conservation bodies can only manage small areas. If we could make coppicing financially viable, we would encourage a much wider uptake of coppicing, creating local rural employment as well as helping threatened species.

The charcoal market place...
In the mid 1990s, supported by WWF and the UK Government’s Countryside Commission, BioRegional Development Group started looking at expanding markets for coppiced wood. One potential market we identified was barbecue charcoal. Most of the 60,000 tonnes we consume in the UK is imported, mainly from tropical forests. Two-thirds of this charcoal is used for barbecues and has a wholesale value of around £20 million per annum. At first we were most concerned with charcoal from clearance of mangrove swamps. These are important habitats and globally around half of them have been eradicated over the past 20 years. Yet they are the important nursery grounds for many marine fish. Mangroves also prevent silt flowing from estuaries out into sea, and in some cases mangrove clearance has suffocated coral reefs. We are now increasingly concerned about cheap charcoal being imported from the clearance of forests in West Africa.

The UK has a very long history of charcoal burning dating back to the Bronze Age but it had almost completely died out by the 1980s in the UK. However, following the Great Storm in 1987, a small revival of the industry got under way, as foresters and tree surgeons experimented with products they could make from the huge surplus of wind blown wood. Using simple steel ring kilns, it was not difficult to get started in production again and a small but ready market was found selling barbecue charcoal to local grocery stores and garden centres.

In the UK, national retailer chains control at least 70% of the charcoal market. Individually, the small scale UK charcoal burners were making only a few tonnes of charcoal per year and could not access the national market which required hundreds of tonnes of charcoal. The big retailers are naturally reluctant to take on large numbers of small producers because it increases their administration costs. If anything, retailers are under pressure to reduce the number of their suppliers. Furthermore, small producers are often unfamiliar with the demanding conditions of supply required by national retailers. They require their suppliers to receive orders electronically – such as through the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) system. The annual cost of installing and maintaining the electronic ordering software is too much for small producers. Then there are the costs of barcoding the product and providing the marketing support which big retailers demand. So at first sight, local producers and national retailers don't fit comfortably with each other.

BioRegional Charcoal Company is born...
BioRegional started working with the British Charcoal Group – an informal group bringing together the UK’s charcoal burners – to implement a solution. We proposed supplying the big retailers via a national network of local producers. We set up a company called BioRegional Charcoal Company Ltd to coordinate the network and to supply barcoded bags to burners, who would deliver charcoal directly to the local outlet of the national retailer. BioRegional Charcoal Company (BRCC) set quality and environmental standards to ensure that the network operated effectively. BRCC also subscribed to EDI and could therefore download orders from retail stores anywhere in the country, passing them on to the local charcoal burner when deliveries were required. Being small independent producers, the possibility of gaps in supply existed, for example if a charcoal burner’s vehicle broke down. However, the network could cope with this by BRCC simply ringing up the next nearest charcoal burner to back up the delivery.

The concept is that the network behaves as a single supplier. Retailers negotiate prices and quality standards with one person – a BRCC representative. The product, though locally produced, is quality controlled and carries a common barcode, allowing the big retailer and small local producer to work together.

The FSC logo
As part of its commitment to the environment and due to the increasing awareness of sustainability issues by consumers and retailers alike, all BRCC products carry the Forest Stewardship Council logo (FSC). For more information on the FSC, please visit their website.

A success!
Our network production model has worked effectively for 8 years, showing local production for local needs in action in the mainstream market. Our main customer is B&Q, the market leader in the DIY (home improvements) sector, a company which has pioneered the introduction of sustainability criteria into its product range. Although a little more expensive than imported charcoal, BioRegional charcoal sells well, being very high quality and also gaining loyalty from some customers because of the story behind the product. The network has grown from 1995, when 30 B&Q stores were supplied from 15 charcoal producers to supplying all larger B&Q stores with around 20 suppliers from Scotland to Cornwall. In 1997, the scheme was expanded to include local firewood and kindling. BRCC now supplies most B&Q stores with firewood and kindling from around 25 suppliers.

With a turnover of around £500,000 per year and each £30,000 of turnover supporting the equivalent of one full time person, the company is currently supporting 16 rural jobs. We appreciate that this is not large in the scheme of things, but it is a working example in an otherwise declining sector. The success of the BioRegional network production model has wider economic significance in the context of falling incomes in rural areas of the UK. Much of the income generated by the charcoal burners is, in turn, spent in the local economy, such as rural shops, helping to support rural communities and thus multiplying the benefits.

BRCC has a positive impact - the facts and figures
Each tonne of local charcoal and each 6 tonnes of firewood sold supports 1 hectare of coppice woodland in long term management. So BioRegional Charcoal Company is supporting around 300 hectares of woodland. Working with Butterfly Conservation in the south of England, we have also targeted some woodlands that support the last remaining populations of pearl bordered fritillary in the area, helping them maintain a foothold for the future.

A research project by a University of London student, Antony Hart, quantified the transport energy required to import charcoal, say from South Africa, compared to delivering locally . We can use Hart’s figures to calculate the quantity of CO₂ released per 3kg bag of charcoal for each stage of its journey to the retailer’s shelf:

S. African plantation
- 400km 0.23kg CO₂
Port in South Africa
- 9,540km 0.77kg CO₂
Port in UK
- 320km 0.07kg CO₂
Importer's Warehouse
- 240km 0.07kg CO₂
Retailer's Warehouse
- 410km 0.18kg CO₂
Retail outlet

Total 10,910km 1.32kg CO₂

Therefore, 1.32kg of CO₂ is emitted for each 3kg bag of charcoal we import. It is worth noting that the long sea journey which accounts for almost all of the total distance actually accounts for only about half of the CO₂ released. Half of the CO₂ released arises from van and lorry journeys to and from the ports.

We have compared the transport CO₂ emissions of imported charcoal to our own local charcoal. In the case of local charcoal there is only one short journey from the production site to the retail outlet, an average trip in a small van or Landrover of 48km. Although these vehicles are a lot less energy efficient at deliveries than bulk haulage lorries, the transport distances are very much shorter.

UK woodland production site
- 48km 0.13kg CO₂
Retail outlet

The CO₂ released per 3kg bag of BioRegional Home Grown Charcoal is 0.13kg. Therefore through our local supply network we have reduced the CO₂ footprint of transporting charcoal by 90%. This is more than BioRegional Development Group’s rule-of-thumb two-thirds reduction target we set ourselves to achieve sustainability in the UK.

Regional scale charcoal plant...
BioRegional can reduce the ecological footprint of transporting charcoal even further than the local supply network. The very small-scale ring kilns currently employed by our charcoal burners are not very efficient. Working with some of our current suppliers and bringing in engineering company partners, we are planning to expand with a UK network of regional scale charcoal plants each producing 2,000 tonnes of charcoal per year, each supporting 15 jobs and supplying around 5% of the UK barbecue market.

Regional scale production will allow us to decrease production costs so that we can compete on price with imported charcoal. Increasing sales volumes will still allow delivery distances to be kept within a 50km radius, but using lorries rather than vans will allow us to reduce the CO₂ footprint to under 0.05kg per 3kg bag of charcoal – twenty times better than imported charcoal. Using this scale of technology also enables us to recover waste heat to pre-dry wood, so that we will only require 4, rather than 6, tonnes of wood to make each tonne of charcoal. We can therefore reduce the woodland component of our charcoal’s ecological footprint by a third. We anticipate that even after pre-drying wood we will have surplus heat which could be used for growing food in polytunnels, for other industrial processes or for hot water to homes.

Government targets...
In theory, the UK could become self-sufficient in charcoal. The government agency responsible for biodiversity, English Nature, would like to return 70,000 hectares of England’s 200,000 hectares of woodland into coppice management, but this can only happen if this land can be brought into economically viable use. Using regional scale charcoal plants, we would need around 35,000 hectares (50% of the English Nature target) for the whole of the UK to become self-sufficient in charcoal. Put the other way around, we could meet 50% of English Nature’s biodiversity targets by producing all our own barbecue charcoal. If English Nature had to meet this target by grant funding coppicing, it would cost at least £2.3 million per year. We would also create around 300 rural jobs, when the UK rural economy has suffered terribly in the past few years.

International charcoal supply - the local network approach
Using the BioRegional Charcoal Network model, we can envisage an international network of regional charcoal plants that supply locally produced charcoal worldwide. B&Q for example now have successful stores in Shanghai and we could set up production of charcoal in China to supply these stores.

We are often asked if promoting greater UK charcoal production is putting producers in developing countries out of business. Aren't we removing one of the few sources of cash income they have? How will people be able to raise their standard of living to help them to protect their environment if they don’t have an opportunity to generate foreign exchange?

But there is much evidence that trading in commodities rarely brings real benefits to poor countries. A United Nations report has shown that the 48 poorest countries have got poorer with trade liberalisation. Of the £2.80 retail price for imported charcoal, less than £0.10 goes to the charcoal burner. Indeed in some countries, such as Brazil, there are areas where charcoal burners are indentured to the charcoal merchants and child labour is commonplace. When we import products without the comfort of Fair Trade certificates, we just cannot be sure we are doing the best for these countries.

We must also not forget that we simply have no option but to address sustainability. It is certainly not sustainable to transport charcoal from the southern hemisphere to the UK. It releases 10 times more CO₂ than local charcoal, and therefore has a 10 times greater contribution to global warming. As the Red Cross, for example, rightly points out, the poorest countries in the world are the ones that will be least able to deal with the consequences of environmental damage and effects of climate change. The UN has predicted that crop yields in the tropics could tumble by as much as 10% for every one degree centigrade rise in global temperature. Environmental sustainability should be non-negotiable.

What we do need to do is to work together so that countries like South Africa can gear exports to products with high foreign exchange earnings and low environmental impact. That doesn't mean that South Africa shouldn't have a charcoal industry. Far from it. We would like to set up a BioRegional charcoal network in South Africa to supply charcoal to South Africans on a local basis. We would like to see South Africans, like us in the UK, have the opportunity for a diversity of employment from rural work to manufacturing, with bulky, transport intensive products being produced and supplied locally wherever possible.

The South African opportunity...
South Africa is well known here in the UK for its exports of fresh fruit and vegetables. However, many black South Africans are not even aware that the country exports so much food. A community leader from Soweto, Mandla Mentoor, visited the BioRegional Development Group’s BedZED eco-village in south London in March 2002. Staff took him to see a local supermarket, displaying produce from all over the world including South Africa. He had this to say,

“I am very shocked to see so much South African fruit and vegetables on British shelves when we are reeling with hunger back home and being forced to eat genetically modified foodstuffs. If there is so much money coming from exports, where is it? We don’t see the money or the vegetables.”

It is clear from Mandla’s comment that there isn’t widespread local support for exporting basic commodities from developing countries. It often does not earn enough money to compensate for loss of food growing potential, particularly when countries like South Africa have to compete against artificially low prices caused by European Union subsidies for its own farmers. It is, in effect, stealing from the poor, and long term, countries like South Africa will be richer for not following a development route that makes them heavily dependent on commodity markets.

Global markets and subsidy structures have created a very perverse situation. Exporting apples from South Africa removes a source of food from Africa at the same time as creating problems for farmers in the UK who have been forced to grub up their orchards. On top of this, we increase CO₂ in the atmosphere. Similarly, South African charcoal undermines our local coppice woodland industries. In becoming more regionally self-sufficient we can promote a diverse regional economy in countries like South Africa and give our coppice woodland industry a chance to flourish. In the UK we could support jobs in our countryside once again and see butterflies return to our woodlands. It is a mutually respectful form of development – each country as far as possible meeting its own everyday needs from local resources and only trading high value products internationally: high earnings and low environmental impact.

Last updated 14th January 2008