CleanSmoke meets the UN goal of sustainably managed forests
All around the world, forests are suffering from heat and drought. But never before have they been as important as in times of climate change as a cooling factor and CO2 storage. According to the Thünen Institute for Forest Ecosystems, the proportion of trees with healthy crowns in Germany has never been so low since 1984. It is not without reason that the United Nations, in its “Sustainability Development Goals“, therefore also calls for the protection of terrestrial ecosystems and the sustainable management of forests. “Smokehouses are increasingly viewed critically in terms of wood consumption, probably also favored by climate change,” says Uwe Vogel, Chairman of the CleanSmoke Coalition, a joint initiative of primary smoke product manufacturers, food producers and retailers. “With CleanSmoke, smoking enterprises as well as trade and consumers can easily show more responsibility for the forests and clearly lower the wood consumption“.
CleanSmoke is produced from waste wood in a forest friendly way
Compared to conventional smoking processes (friction or smoulder smoke), the innovative CleanSmoke smoking process can save a lot of wood – namely around 50 percent. CleanSmoke uses so-called pre-cleaned primary smoke condensates, which are produced exclusively from untreated residual wood. These are sawdust and wood chips from sawmills and the furniture industry, or thinning, crown and branch wood from forestry.
According to calculations of the German Institute of Food Technologies (DIL), the potential for wood savings through the application of CleanSmoke amounts to approximately 3,400 tons per year. This, for example, could be used to build more than 100 wooden houses. The classic smoking process uses approx. 3.75 kg of this resource per ton of smoked meat. The primary smoke condensate for the required amount of CleanSmoke can be produced from 1.9 kg of wood.
Active protection of native forests
According to the DIL, the consumption of wood for conventional smoking is almost twice as high as for CleanSmoke. Its use of about 6.8 million tons for smoulder and friction smoking is compared to only about 3.4 million tons of residual wood for the production of primary smoke condensates. CleanSmoke can therefore also be understood as active protection of the native forests. Not least for this reason the CleanSmoke Coalition (CSC) demands that products smoked with CleanSmoke should be labeled as resource-friendly.