Along with working for FiberMark, I’m a sugar maker. As in maple sugar.

Most people in Vermont and New England know that maple sugaring is one of our biggest local industries and that it’s a part of our heritage. Every late winter and early spring, the whole area is full of active sugar houses, with the steam from the boiling sap billowing out of rustic little shacks all across the region.

I live in the town of Vernon, Vermont, where my family and I have a small sugar house. We tap some small plots of sugarbush—both ours and our neighbors—and we just finished our eighth year of operation. We started out with buckets, but now we’ve gone to a network of tubing connecting tree to tree. It’s a small operation—we end up with about 55 gallons of syrup a season, which isn’t much, but when you understand how much raw sap it takes to boil down to 55 gallons of syrup, you’d be amazed!

More than anything, our sugaring is a social thing, enabling us to get together with friends and family and do something worthwhile.
As a sugar maker, I ran across a study on the Internet that was done by Cornell University. They used a 20-acre plot of ground in northern New Hampshire for this study, where the maple trees were dying for some reason. The bottom line is that when we burn fossil fuels of any kind we create carbon emissions—fallout, in a way. One of the outcomes is acid rain, which then leaches into the ground. This is having a pretty negative impact on maple trees and their growth.

The researchers took some soil samples from that plot and found that the levels of acidity were tremendously high. Another thing they found was that there was no undergrowth—no saplings—at the base of the bigger trees. So they took a gypsum-like product and spread it over the maples in that plot. They figured that within an 8-10-year period they should start to see a difference in the health of the trees. After just two years, though, they noticed a remarkable difference in the tree health and in the new growth that was starting to come up. What they had done was to begin to change the ph factor of the soil.

That ties back to why I’m proud to work here at FiberMark.  The company’s ongoing efforts to burn waste vegetable oil to run a lot of equipment in our plant have the potential to basically create a “net zero” effect on the carbon emissions out of the smokestack.  You can imagine what impact that has on the local environment and on the maple trees.  It’s a priority for me, and, I’m glad to say, for FiberMark, too.