hi macbirch, it's nice to see another aussie still floating around at gardenweb! someone will correct me if Im wrong but I think the concern was that treated timber (with arsenic) was commonly used where it really shouldn't have been like childrens playgrounds where kids are climbing and playing on it so that they had a lot of skin contact with the treated timber. timber treated with creosote would not be any better and I wouldnt use treated timber (old or new) for a vegie garden or kids sand pit for example.

On the other hand I wouldnt see a problem with using old railway ties for driveways or paths unless its obvious that there is still a lot of creosote on them (which would be gross to walk on bare foot) and old railway ties dont seem to have a lot of creosote left. my neighbour for example put railway ties in for garden edging and you couldnt see the creosote or smell it, but it only lasted a couple of years before the termites just ate them through. Perhaps they clean them before they sell them, I dont know.If you can see the creosote or smell it then its a bit of tell as to how much is still on there but unless you have a lot of actual contact with it then the health risk would be small.

Hi trancegemini. I was away for a while because of difficulties accessing a computer and when I got back I was disappointed at how quiet it was. Nice to see a familiar name. You're in WA? We've seen on the news that there are bad fires over there. We had a lot of smoke today from a fire in Kosciuszko National Park. What a terrible summer.

The local paper once warned that old sleepers can contain PCP. I have no idea if you can see it the way you can with the dark oily look of creosote and the green of treated pine. And I don't know if they ever used more than one preservative at a time, or if there are any others. If I hadn't seen the article in the paper I wouldn't know about PCP. It doesn't seem to get mentioned much.

g'day macbirch,

have you ever considered using that clip-lok roofing available in 10" and 20" wide sections app' 5 to 6 meters long (see our building a garden page for how it looks) if you need more details let us know, form the demolition yards, it is old colour bond stuff and i found it lasts a long time almost no leachates to speak of and the termite don't touch it.

also used new railway sleeper material in hardwood it is still going as far as i know, with new seasoned hard wood as it has no sap the termites realy aren't that interested in breaking their teeth on it.

check out those lanolin wood protection sites not sure if that may help keep them at bay?

you can also use besser blocks as well.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: len's garden page

hi macbirch, yes we have had some nasty fires south of Perth, it hasnt been a good summer all round on the fire front has it? everything is just so dry and just waiting to go up in flames it seems. :(

I dont know anything about pcp sorry, Id never heard of that, I always thought creosote was the standard for sleepers. Im like gardenlen (hi len) I tend to use concrete products for the vegie patch, mine is edged with slabs half buried on their side, but when it comes to other people I guess there isnt much we can do. none of the US folks have chimed in here so maybe it hasnt been an issue over there. they are way ahead of us though with the treated timber and have moved on from the arsenic treated timber I believe from reading these forums.

I thought I'd ask here because the US was ahead of us on the treated pine.

I just googled PCP (pentachlorophenol) and there's an article about it on Wikipedia. Never ceases to amaze me what you can find there. It's been used on railway ties in the US. I remembered something about a ban on it in the European Union so a bit more googling refreshed my memory about its various uses. Yeah, that's why I stopped using imported leather gloves for gardening. In Europe they'd have to meet the standards but in Australia I don't think there are even any companies that could test them for residues. They've been advertising one of those travelling sales on tv and I'm wondering if the stuff is more European rejects. A few years ago there was a travelling sale of manchester "originally destined for Europe". Of course they didn't say why it was no longer destined for Europe but I have my suspicions. I hadn't given PCP a thought for years and suddenly I can't get it out of my mind. Possible implications for those of us who are using washing machine water on our gardens too.

Hi Len. I was interested in what you said about lanolin. I had never heard of it being used for wood protection. Googling it led me to an interesting Aussie website for environmentally friendly paints and treatments.

This is what I hate (okay, and love) about the internet. A simple query can suddenly be leading you down all sorts of interesting paths.

I use washing-machine water in the garden. We use 'bio-degradable' laundry soap. I avoid using pt (now acq) in the garden at all. Plain pine boards last a surprisingly long time against soil, and they cheap enough to replace.

Sorry not to chime in from the USA, but I thought you were getting good info...

There was a controversy about PT wood a few years ago, but it seems to have gone away now - and maybe slipped out of the thoughts of most of us - after all, we don't HAVE to think about it anymore. If you search the Forums for "pressure treated wood" or for "safe wood" you might get a number of postings and a number of opinions. As I recall, the concensus boiled down to 1.) railway ties were probably OK for retaining walls, etc. where your physical contact with them would be minimal, 2.) using them for veggie beds or for paths, where you would be touching them frequently or eating veggies, esp. root vegetables, that had touched or were grown in the 3-4 in. (8-12 cm) of soil next to the tie was probably not a good idea, 3.) it was probably OK to use them for veggie beds if you were raising leaf or fruit crops, but not to plant anything in the 3-4 in. (8-12cm.) of soil next to the edge. I would be VERY reluctant to have them in a path or driveway where I would walk on them barefooted, or where my shoes might pick up any that had oozed out with summer's heat that might be then brought into the house. Personally, I hate the smell of creosote, so wouldn't use them at all.

In general, I try to avoid using pressure treated woods, esp. as there is always the problem of what to do with them after they have outlived their usefulness - burning is NOT a good idea, nor is grinding them up to use for mulch. BUT, I do use them for construction (it's called for by code, if nothing else), since I do want buildings, footings and foundations/sills to last as long as possible, and PT DOES rot a lot slower and is less attractive to termites than most plain woods. I can't afford redwood - and probably wouldn't use it anyway because of old-stand logging concerns - nor can I now afford cedar or cypress - their prices have gone sky high - and locust is impossible to get as lumber. So, PT wood is the only way to get the qualities I need. At least, now it SHOULD be safer than the old stuff.

I don't remember now if the PCP issue came up at all. I'll have to look it up and see what the relative danger is. Yet one more thing to worry about....

Most of the pressure treated wood concerns here were over CCA (Copper, chromium, arsenic) treated wood which has been banned/off the market a few years.

g'day macb,

i have 2 links listed on the building a garden page i think have a look at them the product should be available through produce agencies.

yes the US of A and canada are way ahead of us with the CCA issue, especailly here in qld (i think we are the dumping ground) they will only sell CCA timber no alternatives and the sellers are either playing dumb or realy don't know the stuff is banned and under the eye of the EPA even over here.

not far from where i live there must be about 70 or so acres of CCA timber in storage so as you can see they don't want to stop selling it anytime soon up here or then they have to get rid of this toxic material (removal and dumping requires similar methods to the removal and dumping of fibro) themselves. all wooden fences up here are CCA as are our power poles and i can see issued own track when the EPA pull the pin and so ok no more and then all this other stuff will have to be gotten rid of mostly at the homeowners expense.

and when you also consider there are a lot of homes here with CCA treated hardwood frames the issue is going to be huge, as i can see these homes being labelled as toxic so no one will want to buy them and the fire brigade will want to evacuate the area before they start to put out a house fire.

CCA treated material are the new sabestos fibro issue of the century.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: len's garden page

Pnbrown, it's not just the laundry soap, it's what may be coming out of the fabrics. The Europeans seem to be way ahead of us on that one. Maybe it's because whatever gets into their waterways affects agriculture in the next ten countries downstream. I don't know.

Dibbit, sorry to give you one more thing to worry about. The older stuff with creosote or PCP (or anything else?) was what I was actually interested in, as we are starting to catch up with you on the pressure treated stuff. I was interested in your comments about construction. I've recently seen two houses in our suburb being built with green coloured timber. It doesn't look like the pressure treated stuff, brighter and rather patchy like it's been quickly painted on. Usually frames aren't treated around here. Houses are built with wooden floors on brick piers or on a concrete slab. There are a variety of chemical termite treatments on the soil below or Termimesh or Granitguard (the latter I've heard started in Hawaii).

Pablo, yes it's the copper, chrome and arsenic that is the problem. It isn't meant to be used for playgrounds any more but otherwise I think it's still freely available here. There are some safer alternatives coming onto the market too though. Ever heard of LOSP? That's the only one I can think of offhand.

Len, I'll check the links. I don't think enough people know or care about what's inside their walls. I guess that'll change when they have to start putting warning signs up out the front like they sometimes do now with asbestos. Or when they want an extra power point installed and the electrician says forget it, I'm not going in there. Did you ever have pole houses in your area? I'd forgotten about those. They were considered a clever alternative to conventional buildings in some of our steeper suburbs a decade or two ago. I remember seeing a picture of the interior of one of those when it was for sale. Green poles through the family room. Yuk. I suppose you could paint them with some kind of sealer.

yes macb,

i also think that homes and waht risks they could be will be evaluated and have a sign posted like those hazard warning signs you see on trucks that carry chemicals.

then peoiple will care for not being more informed before they built or bought, you can imagine if you see such a sign on a home you want to buy you are probably going to look eleswhere. people who know won't buy homes that contain fibros or have wall or roof cladding as the claddings are used to hide the fibro from sight, but the problem is still there isn't it.

our council here is tagging homes on a data base that contain fibro, so if the fibro dissapears from walls and rooves and there was no permit they will know the owner has doen something illigal. they already have info on what homes contain cca so that data base is up and running.

and for a couple of decades now each time certain jets return to base over the city they reel off pics of the 'burbs, that clearly show changes to properties, the council say they can't use this data but they will when the time comes.

like they use sattelite pics of properties in rural to tag people who put illegal dams in.

len

Got around to looking at your site Len. Some great links. Now I have a bunch of bookmarks to work my way through. I was interested in your info on frogs. I have a bucket under my tap to collect water when I rinse things. There's a small amount of potting mix spilled in it. It rained a little while ago, not enough to fill it but it meant I didn't need to empty it onto any plants for a while. Now there's what appear to be tadpoles in it. So any info on what to do for them is most welcome.

I'm still hoping to hear more about what's happening with any older timber treatments in the US. I first heard about the pressure treated pine problem because that issue was raised in your part of the world. We have some catching up to do.

g'day macb,

not common for frogs to use a temporary water catchment like a bucket, and buckets can be hard for them to get into, did you actually see the float of eggs in the bucket before you saw the tadpoles?

be good if they are tadpoles, but be sure they aren't mozzy larva.

len

I've had frog visitors in the bucket before (rarely) but I've seen mozzies too. I just googled larvae and tadpole images and I'm not sure. Apparently mozzy larvae hang at or near the surface and these fellas are mostly down the bottom. But I'm not sure.

mozzy larvae also hang around the bottom between breathes of air, if they are tadpoles they will change as they get older and have that bulged appearance with a tail attached also tadpoles will need something in their to eat ie.,. some organic material like grass roots or you could feed them frozen lettuce leaves or a little fish food flakes. oh and tadpoles will swim latteraly as well as up and down.

if they are tadpoles you may want to put the bucket where it won't get more rain in it and overflow as the tad's might get flushed out.

by about now i would assuming they will be getting that classic tadpole appearance.

len