Lebanon: Chouf residents rush to buy imported olive ‘wood’
By Maher Zeineddine,
A new type of “firewood” is flooding the Chouf market this autumn as residents, preparing for the coming winter, rush to buy a Turkish-style composite made primarily from olive pits. According to Kamil Halabi, a Chouf resident, the “‘2007 firewood,’ as we are calling it, is very effective and a money-saver.”
“Each log weighs about 1 kilogram and can burn for almost 2 hours,” he explained.
“I have made an agreement with an owner of a wood plant in Turkey, allowing me to import a ton of olive firewood at $130, a total much less expensive than the price of local firewood extracted from orange or oak trees,” Halabi told The Daily Star on Monday.
Halabi explained that a “ton is made up of 40 bunches of firewood, with one bunch containing 25 logs.”
He also acknowledged that consumers will still need to buy “normal” wood, especially oak and orange. “But instead of buying two truckloads of normal firewood, one can now buy one normal and one from the 2007 type,” he said.
Halabi also highlighted the spike in local diesel prices, a development, which he said, “constitutes an additional incentive” to buy his imported goods. “A family needs more than seven barrels of diesel to fulfill its heating needs, knowing that a barrel of diesel costs $150,” he said.
Shawqi Dbaysi, a distributor of firewood from the Chouf, said price-conscious residents of the mountainous area “are used to consuming orange firewood more than oak wood due to its lower prices.”
“A truckload of almost 2 tons of orange firewood costs $300, while that of oak firewood costs $375,” Dbaysi said.
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Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 5:44 pm under
