Friday Afternoon
Friday afternoon took teachers to Jennings State Forest to learn about public land management and the Urban Interface, followed by a tour of Millenium Specialty Chemicals.
Jennings State Forest Tour
The Jennings
State Forest encompasses 24,000 acres of land in Middleburg, Florida.
Four agencies manage the forest and try to balance public use (recreation,
fishing, hunting, timber production) with natural resource conservation making
it an ideal location to learn about public land management in the wildland/urban interface. In addition,
we
learned about state forester's conservation and restoration efforts in the
forest. Focus on restoration issues regards to prescribed fire and timber
management. Goal
is restoring, maintaining native ecosystems.
There was also a presentation about prescribed burning and its role in pine forest management. The forest has 70 miles of boundary which butts up against residential developments. Teachers learned what special considerations needed to be taken to accommodate the residential public living all along the border of the state forest. A key issue is urban fringe conflicts -- neighbors have negative perspectives and lack of understanding. Health and traffic impact of smoke/burning.
Money from legislature is down, need to find new revenue, implemented $1 use fee (honor system).
Tour
Millennium Specialty Chemicals processes 10-11 million gallons of turpentine annually making them the largest buyer of turpentine in the world. We visited Millennium's research and development building, one small part of their 59 acre facility in Jacksonville.
Turpentine, which is a by-product of the pulping of pine trees, is received from 60 pulp and paper mills throughout North America. From a ton of wood 1/2 to 2 gallons of turpentine is produced.
At the Jacksonville plant, turpentine is fractionated into
alpha-pinene and beta-pinene, two of its major components. These two
materials are the starting points for a host of other chemicals used in the
flavors and fragrance industry in food and beverage, household, and
personal-care products.
Teachers received a primer in terpine chemistry from Rodney Gorman, Senior Process Chemist with Millennium. Besides talking about the Millennium chemicals and its history he presented how turpentine is broken down into its main constituent materials and how those chemicals can be further processed to make raw materials for a host of flavor and fragrance products used in many common consumer products in stores today.
From there we visited Aaron McClain, Manager of Quality Assurance in his lab
where they check and verify the quality of the products they receive and
produce. He showed us a gas chromatograph of turpentine, a pictorial view of its
constituent compounds to demonstrate the high levels of alpha- and beta-pinene
as well as the lesser constituents. Aaron then showed us some of the tools and
processes they use in the lab for quality assurance purposes including:
distillation, pyrolysis, re-dox (reduction/oxidization).
And then we received an enlightening presentation
from Pat Whelan about how
Millennium chemicals are utilized in flavor and fragrance products. Millennium
sells their chemicals to people who make final products such as those that we
sampled. The synthesized fragrance products are less expensive than their
natural counterparts thus preserving the natural sources.
Florida Forestry Friends Sponsored Dinner
The final dinner of the tour will be catered by Chef Jeff at Fort Clinch State Park in Fernandina Beach. Teachers were treated to a tour of the Fort and a taste of 19th century life there. Florida Forestry Friends set up a tent on the beach and the rain let up enough for us to enjoy a relaxing dinner and sunset before heading back to the hotel.
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