Sustainable Fencing
Special outift required to clean up toxic dust from treated pine fencing posts.
We have always been dubious about fencing as unless you really need to keep something in then it also works the other way and keeps other things out. Most particularly where we live fences form barriers for wildlife and can limit their ability to move through their habitat home ranges. As we don’t have ay pets, we chose to live where we do to enjoy the local wildlife, we are quite happy to have no fencing around our property. Although on 2 sides of our boundary our neighbours have fences up to keep in pets or livestock.
We do maintain a fence around our vegetable patch to ensure that the local wildlife don’t eat our human food. We keep our indigenous plants healthy on our bush block to ensure wildlife have their own food too. We maintain our boundary to our property by just having metal stake/pickets to mark the border, but without any wire, wildlife are freely able to move across this boundary. We absolutely would not use any barbed wire this is a really nasty product, totally unnecessary and highly like to injure, humans, livestock, pets or wildlife. Additionally smaller wildlife can be trapped on the barbs often leading to a long slow and painful death.
Since the bushfire in February 2009 we have also become very wary of treated pine posts used in fencing. These are very popular and used widely throughout Australia for fencing and many other uses. After the bushfire event these posts had burnt and left behind piles of green toxic dust, containing nasty chemicals like chromium, copper and arsenic. After the bushfire it was very warm and dusty for 3 weeks until we received some rain and this dust would have been blowing around. This is really scary considering how many thousands of kilometres of fencing was burnt leaving behind toxic dust, who knows where it all ended up!
We quickly ensured we cleaned up and disposed of any toxic soil close to our property. Bagging soil for proper disposal through waste companies who could deal with such nasty chemicals.
The fencing that we do have around our vegetable patch uses recycled untreated (no chemicals) hardwood posts and recycled fencing wire (no barbs). We pick up most of the materials we need for this small amount of fencing off hard waste, the material scraps thrown away by others in our area. Metal posts marking our boundary also survived the bushfire and did not need replacing. I would not recommend that anyone use treated pine anywhere near a food growing area as the chemicals can leach into the soil.
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