John White (Timber Trade Federation): I think we’ve made tremendous headway on the environment and our reputational husbandry on this question, particularly on timber sourcing. This country, in particular has a lot to be proud of in the steps it’s taken to tackle the illegal timber trade. Now the new EU Timber Regulation is coming in and will reinforce everything we’ve been working towards. It will take away the risk and worry of illegal timber entering our supply chain so we can focus on the narrative about timber’s performance and benefits.
Peter Latham (James Latham plc): But we can’t be complacent. Once we’ve ticked the legality and sustainability box the environmental argument will move elsewhere. Many of our competitor material producers are based close to the market and will start to turn the market’s attention to such issues as our suppliers’ employment practices, the carbon footprint of shipping timber around the world. It’s a question we should tackle now before competitors really seize on to it.
JW: In fact, this is under consideration at the TTF right now.
John Kissock (Scottish Forestry & Timber Technology Advisory Group): We do overall have a very positive environmental story to tell, but we need to tell it more strongly. Recently I was representing the SFTTG at a meeting of a range of industries looking at the environment and climate change and someone presented a bar chart. It showed that Scotland emits 90 million tonnes (equivalent) of greenhouse gas annually and that the country’s only industry mitigating that, to the tune of absorbing 10 million tonnes of CO2, was forestry. That made the representatives of the oil, defence, construction and even tourism industries, really sit up. We’ve got to get this sort of message out.
Andrew Scoones (Building Centre): But I think your focus shouldn’t only be on timber’s embodied carbon and energy. In terms of arguments we see around the energy and general environmental performance of building, these are relatively small factors. The focus of legislation and the construction industry is on the complete performance of the building in use. So we also have to address how timber and other materials relate and what they bring to this area.
JW: I don’t entirely agree with that. Following [government construction adviser] Paul Morrell’s work on sustainable construction I think the light has gone on with a lot of engineers and architects that embodied carbon is a crucial element in green building. It’s very well measuring a house’s energy performance over its 80-year life. The question is how do you get biggest bang now in terms of carbon saving and its through using materials that lock it in – namely timber. I get the impression that this argument is increasingly being accepted among specifiers; that every time you use timber you take carbon out of the atmosphere. Every time you use concrete or plastic you put it back in.
AS: Perhaps so, but another increasingly powerful tool in the commerce of buying and selling buildings is the Energy Performance Certificate and, nowhere on this does it ask what a structure is built of. Another area for you to address.
Sheam Satkuru-Granzella (Malaysian Timber Council): From the tropical perspective, a key issue in the whole environmental debate is this question being raised by governments and international organisations, notably the UN, over the relative merits of conserving forest and managing them for sustainable timber production. It’s an increasing disjuncture. The UN REDD+ initiative (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is strongly skewed to conservation. But no-one has yet answered Malaysia’s question of, if we took our forests out of production, how we would be compensated for the US$6bn a year we earn from exporting timber – which we believe, in any event, is sustainably produced?
Someone has to do the equation of the carbon benefits of sustainable timber production, versus standing trees. When they do, we’re confident timber production won’t suffer by comparison.
PL: I also think we have to be wary there are people with powerful voices and money who want to stop forestry in some places altogether. Their first tactic was to say it’s not sustainable, so we put certification in place. Now we have initiatives like REDD focused on taking forest out of production and behind them people looking to use the carbon issue to get at forestry again.
JW: We do have to tackle these arguments and put out the message that sustainable timber production helps maintain the forest: that “the forest that pays is the forest that stays”.
Mark Bowers (UCM): But one thing in the whole environmental debate and its impact on our market we still haven’t resolved is having multiple certification schemes, which I feel just accentuates the fragmentation in our sector and acts as a further commercial obstacle. It means, compared to other industries we give customers a confused view on environmental performance. Certification has been essential and done the industry a lot of good. But the benefits are undermined by the fact that we can’t provide a simple, clear message.
SSG: I think we do need more than one certification scheme to ensure healthy competition and avoid complacency. But the issue for us is the continuing elevation by certain interested parties of one scheme over another. In Malaysia we have two – one’s accepted by certain NGOs, the other isn’t, despite the fact that their principles, criteria and indicators are pretty much identical.
PL: The trouble is, certification so far has been driven by environmentalists and forestry and the people in the middle, the timber trade who need to communicate with the market to make it all work and get the message understood, have just sat back and gone along with it. I spoke to a big builder the other day who said he thought 80% of the timber he bought was certified, but he only claimed 50% as the merchants who supplied him couldn’t segregate the material. We have to tackle this and make life easier for our customers.
JK: And, when you think about it, none of this activity arguing the merits of one certification scheme over another, or certification per se, adds any value to our products. Customers want certification primarily that’s simple and economic, that allows them just to get on and undertake a construction process without being concerned about the origin of materials.
JW: Ultimately we should be able to talk about certified product, full stop. We shouldn’t have to differentiate to the customer between certification schemes. And I think we are slowly moving to that point because we’re embedding in market consciousness that all wood coming to the UK is from sustainable source. Again whether that’s achieved by 2016 is another question.
Geoff Rhodes (Coillte Panel Products): Where the environmental concerns also impinge on our business is in driving the increased use of wood for fuel to generate heat and power. It’s a global phenomenon that adds a whole new dynamic to the market. We have a whole new sector competing for wood. Where’s it going to come from and what impact will this demand have on supply and prices?
MB: It will be an increasingly significant factor. A year ago I attended a seminar given by a leading Scandinavian forest products company. They presented themselves as a producer of a range of products; pulp, sawn timber, plywood and now biofuel too. Ultimately they said, when they harvest each log, they’ll decide, between their product areas where the fibre goes depending on the markets, demand and consumption. They we’re trying to reassure us that we’d still get plenty of wood, but were actually saying we’ve got access to this raw material and we’ll direct it to the market where we get highest yield. But need this be a bad thing? Perhaps it will support the price of timber, because there will be less raw material and we aspire to raising the perceived value of our products.
JK: The difficulty with that is we’re talking about a subsidised industry consuming this wood fuel. We’re not comparing apples with apples. To kick-start the green energy industry, the government has heavily subsidised the power generators, enabling them to pay a higher price for the fibre. The power companies themselves may be saying they’re strategically placed to depend on imported material. But we can imagine what will happen if imported product goes into short supply and they have to buy locally. It will put domestic panel producers using locally produced small round wood and sawmill residues under severe pressure. Government policy hasn’t been thought through and, while WPIF, ConFor, the Forestry Commission and others have been very vociferous on this, more needs to be done to explain to politicians the linkages in the supply chain. We should establish a straightforward hierarchy of timber use; sawn products comes first because it locks in carbon, then use waste, recycled and residual material which cannot be used in wood products as fuel for combined heat and power and finally for power generation.
