Fired up

After a day sewing, treating fabrics and ironing, workers steam out of the Maurea Garment Factory in a suburb of Phnom Penh. Unilke some other factories, this one doesn’t have to deal with work slowdowns due to electricity outages of high monthly energy bills since management installed a wood-burning boiler to heat water used to dye fabrics and generate steam needed for ironing. … While the capital and its suburbs are served somewhat reliably by the national electricity grid, many factories burn wood to heat water instead of using electric water heaters. The International labor Organization (ILO) reports that factories throughout Cambodia get just over 43 percent of their total energy from buring wood. And as the garment sector, the central pillar of the Cambodian economy, grows, the demand for wood is increasing as well. For now,that’s not a real problem experts say, since while it might be counter-intuitive, the use of wood keep factories’ costs down and is not as hard on the environment as it might seem. However, they also say that the practice is not sustainable in the long run. As the Kingdom expands its manufacturing base and the hunger for wood grows, it threatens to put further pressure on the nation’s forests, already suffering from illegal logging and poorly regulated economic development. …