CERES Fair Wood wins Darebin Pitch-IT
Thursday was a big night for CERES’ newest social enterprise Fair Wood – our name got called out and now we are extremely grateful recipients of $20,000 in start-up funding from Darebin Council and Melbourne Innovation Centre’s Darebin Pitch-It Competition
It’s been a big learning curve ever since architect Paul Haar, the visionary behind CERES Fair Wood, suggested that CERES should be doing the same thing with local timber as it does with local produce.
I knew deforestation was a major contributor to carbon pollution but it was a big shock finding out that behind drug dealing and counterfeiting, illegal logging was the third largest criminal activity by value in the world.
Discovering that around $1 billion of illegally logged timber, complete with “genuine” sustainability certificates, is entering the Australian market each year, was also pretty disconcerting.
But it was seeing the scale of illegal logging wiping out indigenous-owned forests in Myanmar (pictured above), Cambodia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea just for wood to build our houses, furniture and patios – that was an utter heart-breaker.
The counter to all this has been getting to know local farm-foresters and small saw-millers who operate around Victoria as well as indigenous-owned timber mills in Northern Australia and seeing this burgeoning fair timber movement growing by the day.
CERES Fair Wood looks forward to helping our community learn where our wood is coming from and bringing responsibly grown timber from local and indigenous tree farmers and saw-millers to more and more people’s building projects.
I’d like to offer our congratulations to fellow finalists MUVi, Medical Connect, Refillr and The Pollinator Alliance (aka – Benedict The Practical Beekeeper who also leads CERES Bee Group). We feel very lucky to have received this prize in your company and wish you all the best.
How do you feel about pet food?
After lugging home a 20kg bag of dry dog food from the pet supplies shop the other day it occurred to me that it would make a lot of sense to get this type of thing delivered.
What do you think?
Isabelle, who manages marketing at Fair Food, has put together a 7 question multi-choice survey (she says it takes 3 minutes tops) to find out if you’d like organic dry pet food delivered by Fair Food, what kind, what size and anything else you’d care to say on the topic.
Have a great week
Chris
