Additional to Clayton Mitchell's comments regarding our forestry industry is its role in combating climate change (The Weekend Sun, December 13, page 31).

The carbon that forestry sequesters from the atmosphere is lost to us via the log trade.

Only through the extensive use of timber in permanent buildings and structures can the carbon sink quality be retained. Timber multi-storey buildings not only become carbon sinks but are known to have many positive qualities – flexing in earthquakes, charring rather than collapsing in fires, suited to prefabrication, and replacing CO2 generating steel and cement.

Only through the export of sawn timber rather than logs is the carbon sink quality likely to be retained and the additional un-resolved problem of the use of the dangerous fumigant methyl-bromide with the log trade, dispensed with.

The problem of ‘slash', left over from logging operations and recently highlighted, contains carbon sequestered from today's atmosphere and should be harvested to replace coal's fossil carbon. (The late Barry Brickell, of Driving Creek Railway at Coromandel, used pine in his pottery kilns for its hot burning quality.)

E Orsulich, Otumoetai.