A company that has received billions of pounds in green energy subsidies from UK taxpayers is cutting down environmentally-important forests, a BBC Panorama investigation has found.
Drax runs Britain’s biggest power station, which burns millions of tonnes of imported wood pellets - which is classed as renewable energy.
Reporter Joe Crowley also followed a truck from a Drax mill to verify it was picking up whole logs from an area of precious forest.
Panorama discovered Drax bought logging licences to cut down two areas of environmentally-important forest in British Columbia.
But documents on a Canadian forestry database show that only 11% of the logs delivered to the two Drax plants in the past year were classified as the lowest quality, which cannot be used for wood products.
They also said that Drax applies stringent sustainability standards to its own pellet production as well as suppliers, with verification from third-party certification schemes.
The original article contains 822 words, the summary contains 151 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A company that has received billions of pounds in green energy subsidies from UK taxpayers is cutting down environmentally-important forests, a BBC Panorama investigation has found.
Drax runs Britain’s biggest power station, which burns millions of tonnes of imported wood pellets - which is classed as renewable energy.
Reporter Joe Crowley also followed a truck from a Drax mill to verify it was picking up whole logs from an area of precious forest.
Panorama discovered Drax bought logging licences to cut down two areas of environmentally-important forest in British Columbia.
But documents on a Canadian forestry database show that only 11% of the logs delivered to the two Drax plants in the past year were classified as the lowest quality, which cannot be used for wood products.
They also said that Drax applies stringent sustainability standards to its own pellet production as well as suppliers, with verification from third-party certification schemes.
The original article contains 822 words, the summary contains 151 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!