Naturally durable wood pre-dates preservative-treated wood and has been demonstrated to offer a suitable service life for certain applications where preservative-treated wood is not feasible. Heartwood extractives have been demonstrated to impart bio-deteriorative resistance to naturally durable wood species. These extractives are typically found in the heartwood of living trees and are produced either by the death of parenchyma cells or as the result of external stimuli.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Illegal logging is a global crisis with significant environmental, economic, and social consequences. Efforts to combat it call for forensic methods to determine species identity, provenance, and individual identification of wood specimens throughout the forest products supply chain. DNA-based methodologies are the only tools with the potential to answer all three questions and the only ones that can be calibrated "non-destructively" by using leaves or other plant tissue and take advantage of publicly available DNA sequence databases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCopper is a common component in wood preservatives and is used to protect the wood against fungal degradation. Previous research has shown that the Cu++ oxidation state provides the best wood protection, and Cu++ is widely believed to be the oxidation state of most copper within treated wood. A recent study using X-ray absorption near edge spectroscopy (XANES) reported high amounts of Cu+ in wood that had been in contact with corroded fasteners.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHeartwood extracts of naturally durable wood species are often evaluated as alternatives to chemical wood preservatives, but field data from long-term performance testing are lacking. The current study evaluated the long-term (five-year) performance of two non-durable wood species treated with heartwood extracts of either , , , or alone or combined with linseed oil. Stakes (45.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of biological and chemical remediation of chromated copper arsenate (CCA) treated Corymbia citriodora poles, removed from service after 30 years. The presence of arsenic (As), chromium (Cr) and copper (Cu) was quantified by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES). Twelve species of decay fungi were used for the biological remediation assay.
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