Heavy Tree Boxes

[Scooter]

From today's WSCA Newsletter:

Heavy seedling boxes are back in the news with the record single box so far weighing in at +80lbs. A contractor who invited WorkSafeBC to assist them in dealing with heavy boxes on their project was written up for not properly training workers to lift boxes and for failing to have procedures in place for handling them. An ironic outcome perhaps, but helpful in that it does give some regulatory clarity and recognition and makes it incumbent on the industry to deal with this intermittent but persistent problem. The problem of overweight boxes now has some regulatory weight, so to speak.

[RPF]

Any idea which nursery that box came from?

PRT last spring was placing a "Heavy" label (in bright red) on boxes that were heavier than normal (>50 lbs if I remember correctly).

[Rainman]

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[Nate]

Thanks WCB.

[Mike]

Why is a single box weighing in at 80 pounds? There must have been a ridiculous amount of non-absorbed water splashing around in the plastic bag for it to hit that weight.

[Scooter]

We had stubby boxes this spring with six hundred trees per box. They were pretty heavy, but there were definitely no compliants with that many trees in them.

[Pandion]

These boxes were way too common this Spring. They often did have a couple of inches of water in the bottom of the bag and the trees smelled skanky too. For some reason planters were doing a little dance before bagging up.

[newforest]

shouldn't the Nursery industry have figured out an ideal / best-practice moisture content in a plug before extraction? the ones grown in a greenhouse are 100% under their control in that regard. plugs grown outdoors on tables are a different situation.

[Evergreen]

The nursery industry no doubt knows what ideal moisture content is, but carefully monitoring moisture content prior to and during lifting is not the cheapest and most cost effective way to get the crop out. The nursery industry is at least as competitive as the planting sector so they have to go as cheap as possible. Currently there are no rules about maintaining optimum water content so it's often easier to err on the side of more water. Until the licensees and the government set some guidelines, nurseries will continue to err on the side of heavy.

Heavy boxes are certainly an issue as they pose a risk to everyone down the line. Perhaps the biggest risks are to those people moving the boxes to the planting sites. When you head to the cold storage with your 5-ton truck or your Fist, you're expecting to load X number of boxes. When you get there and those boxes weigh in at closer to 50 pounds, all of a sudden you are dangerously over loaded. Again there is no system in place to forewarn contractors that they'll be dealing with heavier than normal boxes. Even though some nurseries do weigh boxes from each lift and some even send that information on to cold storage facilities, this information is not passed on to contractors. Over loaded trucks are one thing but over loaded helicopter slings could make for a very nasty situation. Most of us who use helicopters to sling have a little chart showing how many boxes we can sling with each different type of helicopter. You just hope that if the boxes are really heavy, the pilot or someone figures it out!

While heavy boxes is what this thread is about, I think the real issue is heavy seedlings when it comes to planters. We could put less trees in boxes and make sure they all weigh less than 40 pounds but that doesn't help the planter who needs to bag up a certain number of trees to make it possible to get to the back of their piece and make optimal money. Planters are likely to bag up a full box or whatever they're used to depending on the plug size, so when heavy seedlings show up, people tend to keep bagging the same number of trees. This can lead to all kinds of musculoskeletal (MSI) injuries. Rather than focus on keeping box weights down we should be making sure nurseries are required to keep moisture content in seedlings at a happy medium so as to keep both the trees and the people safe from harm.

[salbrecher]

Many seedlings in BC are open grown outside of greenhouses and the lifting weight is highly dependent on the antecedent weather conditions. Moving seedlings into the greenhouse to drain plugs for several days can only remove so much water as plugs are made of soil that specifically retains moisture. Lifting schedules are generally quite tight and species dependent and there is not a lot of room to play with scheduling of lifting around weather.

Simply putting less trees per box can add extra handling and transport cost to everyone involved and can reduce efficiency.

Heavy seedlings are certainly an issue but there is not a simple solution.

[Evergreen]

Good points salbrecher. There certainly is a component of outside grown trees and these are particularly difficult to control moisture content with. A big rain event at lifting time and you have wet plugs. As you state "putting less trees per box can add extra handling and transport cost to everyone involved and can reduce efficiency". It inevitably comes down to weighing planter's risk of injury against cost. Once again it's relative safety. We can't afford to dress all planters in Kevlar, nor ask them to slow down to reduce tendonitis. The forest companies and government will certainly not want to pay more to get their seedlings to the site. There's a lot of safety speak out there but when it comes to issues like this, it often becomes more about saving money and less about preventing injuries and reducing risk.

[Scooter]

Heavy seedlings are certainly an issue but there is not a simple solution.

Actually, there is: bag up with less.

The only problem is that it isn't an appealing solution for planters. So they do what they're best at, and figure ways to circumvent the system such as by squeezing the water out of the bundles. We're just all too afraid to admit that all planters do this.

[Pandion]

Actually, there is: bag up with less.

The only problem is that it isn't an appealing solution for planters. So they do what they're best at, and figure ways to circumvent the system such as by squeezing the water out of the bundles. We're just all too afraid to admit that all planters do this.

Yeah, no problem, you can just deadwalk in and out of your piece over 20 times to make sure the back gets filled. If you're lucky, your foreman might hike a bagup in a little ways. Of course planters are going to eliminate the excess water weight, heavy bagups wreck your body, and deadwalking costs too much money.

[retrovertigo]

We had a lot of these. Mostly pine and spruce from PRT Vernon. Theory on our crew was it was connected to the seedling mortality, so they heavily watered them down and treated them with something prior to cold storage, hence the 'skanky' smell of rotten eggs and old paint (mmmmm!).