Pest management

Ken Myers asks about suggestions treating a bale of unsaleable
clothes against possible pest infestation.

We do indeed advise museums to treat their museum decoration
material before entering the museum, especially the wood used for
building props. A cheap and easy and environmentally safe way to do
this, is to have the bale heat treated over a weekend by a company
specialized in drying timber.

Australia has very strict import rules, so any company shipping to
Australia has to prove that the transport containers and pallets
have been treated before shipping. You might therefore contact a
shipping company. Here in Switzerland, any company where you can buy
wooden transport pallets will be able to do (or to organize) a heat
treatment for you. They heat a whole container full of material at a
time. For wood pallets it takes one day of heating to be on the safe
side.

For a bale the size you describe I would suggest to have them treat
it over the weekend for two days. This guess seems to be in
accordance with Tom Strang's experience published in an article
"another brick in the wall" in: proceedings of the 3rd Nordic
Symposium on Insect Pest Control in Museums, Stockholm 1998, p.
10-29, (especially see his graph fig. 9, p.19). In the same book,
there is also a paper about heat treatment experiences in flour
mills (i.e. complete buildings). As you are not dealing with museum
objects, I don't see any problem using heat treatment instead of
fumigation.

As far as setting out traps in the loading dock area is concerned, I
wonder if winter time is the right time to catch crawling animals...
and maybe you don't want to wait until summer.

Karin von Lerber
Prevart GmbH - Konzepte fur die Kulturgutererhaltung
Oberseenerstr. 93
CH-8405 Winterthur Switzerland
+41 52 233 12 54
Fax +41 52 233 12 57


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 13:42
                Distributed: Wednesday, February 2, 2000
                       Message Id: cdl-13-42-014
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