Much has been written about the potential of forest products certification both as a tool to encourage sustainable forest management and to improve market access for timber products. The theory is simple: a reliable system to certify that a particular wood product comes from a well managed forest would serve to overcome prejudices about the links between wood products and deforestation. At the same time, demand for forest certification would encourage forest owners to improve management practices.
The practice is proving to be rather more complicated. Despite endless conferences and discussions over the past decade, and the promotional efforts of the likes of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), AF&PA’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), and Pan European Forest Certification scheme (PEFC), the total area of certified forest amounts to less than 3% of world forest area.
A major obstacle is to track and certify each link in the supply chain – the chain of custody – so that customers can be assured that the wood used in a product, or a specified proportion of it, derives from a certified forest. A recent paper published in the Journal of the Institute of Wood Science gives an insight into the scale of the problem. The paper, by Michael Buckley and Dr Martin Ansell, considers two wood supply chains: a large sawmilling company in Pennsylvania; and a furniture manufacturing plant in the Vende, the centre of woodworking in France.
Case study
The first case study illustrates the problems of chain of custody for wood processing plants buying raw material from numerous small private forest owners, a situation which is typical throughout the eastern US and western Europe. The Pennsylvanian company buys logs in several main species, to feed a sawmill and a dimension plant. The company does not own or control forest; it depends on local log suppliers within a 25-100 mile radius and accordingly buys from about 800 small private forest owners. The sawmill also buys sawn lumber from 40 other smaller sawmills to augment its own production of up to 118,000m3 per year. It can safely be assumed that these smaller sawmills in turn may buy from at least 1,000 out of the 500,000 private forest owners in the state.
The sawmill also buys some ‘gatewood’ logs, a common practice in the US. These are logs offered at the gate of a sawmill by independent logging contractors or hauliers from one or more forests that may not be identified to the buyer.
At present, less than 1% of private forest owners in Pennsylvania are formally certified for sustainable forestry. The mill is not located near to the federal Allegheny National Forest. Even if certified logs were available, it would be technically difficult and prohibitively expensive to alter mill operations to ensure separation of certified and uncertified raw material, either by physical segregation or by batch processing of certified and uncertified material at different times.
Like many in the European furniture sector, the French furniture manufacturer now acts more like an assembly plant, buying finished and semi-finished components from the most competitive sources.
Hardwood producers
The French Vende is not a significant hardwood producing area and is therefore dependent on imports. The manufacturer had no sawmill capability and thus was unable to buy certified logs. The company is a major buyer of American oak sawn lumber and pre-sized dimension and of American oak veneer and edge-lipping to match the sawn lumber. Numerous intermediaries were involved in the trading chain for American oak sawn lumber, including a European importer in France or Belgium; sometimes also an importer/exporter in Canada; a concentration yard in the US; the American sawmiller; not to mention the huge numbers of private forest owners supplying logs to the mill.
The veneer trade flow is equally complicated, involving two or three intermediaries. Certification in the veneer sector presents unique challenges because producers need to select logs individually from a very wide range of forest sources to ensure quality.
Advocates of forest certification tend to dismiss these problems, pointing to evidence that systems of chain of custody are already working effectively, for example under the FSC scheme.
In many ways, the reasons for the success of chain of custody in agriculture are absent from the forest sector. Food companies and farmers are assured of a price premium for food products from ‘pure’ or ‘organic’ sources. There is no equivalent driver of demand in the wood sector since worries about sustainable forest management are just too far removed from the average consumer.
These difficulties have led many in the wood industry to conclude that efforts to implement chain of custody certification may be a waste of time. But perhaps this view is too short-sighted. Technical developments are also beginning to make chain of custody procedures more accessible.
