Charcoal — first legal cargo from Cuba in more than 50 years — arrives at Port Everglades

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article128433209.html

YES, Charcoal!

I recently heard of the great progress on our relationship with Cuba. I could not be more thrilled. With that said, it amazes me on what type of products would be an appeal to the US from a small island like Cuba. Would you believe the first imported containers are filled with Charcoal? Yes, that is right. We must have such a demand that a small island nation with limited land and resources has a robust charcoal industry that can compete with our U.S. companies. Now, I want Cuba to have the industry and export goods to serve its people. But, by using a “worthless plant” as a charcoal feed stock as they are doing is great, if they replace the plant with a tree or plant that is sustainable and can produce something as it lives, then produce charcoal with the plant when it is dead.

The reason this stands out to me is as follows. We as a nation, culture, consumers, and the largest free market capitalistic democracy in the world still are missing the boat. We throw away billions of pounds of wood in landfills every year. These landfills are within close proximity to the consumers of wood i.e. Charcoal, firewood, boards, lumber, etc. Our goal is to take the amount of local wasted wood and covert it to GDP with local companies. Charcoal is just one of the industries we target in our long range vision. We in the US throw away about 25% of the total consumed hardwood in out country. Let me say that another way. We consume for examples sake 1 billion tons annually of hardwood. This is within all the products we use. We at the same time throw away 250 million tons of hardwood in the form of un used or under utilized trees. We mainly do this in Urban Centers, cities.

Now for Blog reason, I will not note every paper and study that shows all of this. I would have you sign up for our news letter so this blog and good information on how we can reverse this with BUSINESS, CAPITALISM and EDUCATION. We can’t fix a problem we don’t know we have.

Thank you and stay tuned,

Damon Barron