Peter Hall’s interest in biomass

Peter Hall from Scion explains how he became interested in biomass. What was once a curious interest became serious research as Peter tried to reduce waste produced in wood harvesting.

While working as a forest manager, Peter Hall noticed that waste wood off-cuts were not processed for anything and were just left in the forest to decay. This inspired him to investigate how much wood was left to decay and whether this wood could be used for something else. He started recording the quantities of waste wood in his spare time, and this interest eventually led him to do several research projects.

Transcript

PETER HALL My interest in biomass started when I worked in forestry. I used to be a forest manager and had an active involvement in harvesting operations. There’s quite a lot of wood waste generated during harvesting and other forestry operations, and sometimes it causes problems in the forest around forest management and little issues. And it just seemed to me that there was a much better way of using this material than just leaving it in the forest to rot. So I started, when I had some spare time away from my real job, measuring how much of this material was produced, and just over a period of time, it’s gone from an interest to a job.