It’s all very well to have eco labels for timber and free trade agreements that suggest that rainforest and other timber be sustainably sourced and labelled. But it’s not happening.
While many consumers want to be environmentally responsible when they purchase timber or items made from wood they face so many eco-labels that an informed choice becomes very difficult.
It is unfair to put the onus on consumers to do the right thing when the big money is made doing the wrong thing – illegally logging tropical rainforests – say informed observers.
Mark Thomson, founder of Eco-Effective Solutions, says many timber eco labels are just marketing labels or clever brands.
“Many supply chain stakeholders use loopholes and lack of verified information instead of on relying on the globally recognised and agreed certifications,” Thomson says.
But efforts are being made at some commercial and government levels to halt the importation of illegally sourced tropical timber.
Some of the hardware stores area also making an effort.
Mitre 10 said it would try
Hardware store Mitre 10, owned by the Metcash Independent Hardware Group (IHG), stated on its website that the “majority of IHG sourced timber and wood products are currently third-party certified by FSC, PEFC or verified legal.
“Our goal is for 100 per cent of IHG sourced imports of timber and wood products to be FSC, PEFC or verified legal by the end of FY23.”
Goals are important, however, up-to-date reporting on chain of custody certification status and current certificates are the only way consumers can be certain the product is not a result of illegal practices,” according to Thomson, who is also an independent director of Responsible Wood.
Bunnings has done it
By contrast, Bunnings promised it would deliver certified FSC or PEFC timber in all its natural forest products by December 2020 and appears to have done so.
In 2018, its website stated the company made a commitment “that all natural forest products will originate from third party certified forests by December 2020”.
This required all timber to be “independently certified by the FSC, Programme for Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) or equivalent standard, with FSC preferred in highly contentious regions”.
Bunnings confirmed that the policy has been adhered to.
“The 2020 Responsible Timber Sourcing policy has been fully implemented,” a Bunnings spokesperson told The Fifth Estate.
Seven suppliers who did not comply by the 2020 deadline and were granted an extension have “either completed their transition to meet the policy requirements or no longer supply timber products to Bunnings”, the spokesperson said.
Timber imports
Early this year the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry fined 14 Australian furniture importers more than $186,000 because they didn’t act to minimise the risk of importing illegally harvested timber.
Head of Compliance and Enforcement at the department Peter Timson said that Australia had strict requirements for importing timber and it is essential to hold importers to account.
“We are enforcing our powers to help combat illegal logging which has been linked to organised crime, civil unrest, corruption, species extinction and environmental destruction around the world,” Timson says.
“Importers must conduct adequate due diligence assessments. They must understand where they are sourcing their timber from and to limit the risk of it being illegally harvested.”
Those that didn’t follow the rules were issued with 14 fines under the Illegal Logging Prohibition Act 2012 and the Illegal Logging Prohibition Regulation 2012 of $13,320 each, he said.
According to Thomson chain of custody certification is the mechanism to ensure that timber is sustainably sourced – however, this requirement seems to be regularly overlooked by Australian importers or paperwork is confused with other lesser timber certification systems.
“As part of the chain of custody the consumer and supply chain stakeholder can look at a piece of furniture or timber product and see an FSC or Responsible Wood logo that has an identification number on it. Without the identification number the chain of custody may be broken.
“The identification number check is easily overlooked and the motivation to enforce it is low, as many stakeholders in the chain profit from cheaper timber availability. Logo use without the identification number provides a convenient loophole,” Thomson says.
“Although Australia has modern slavery and illegal logging laws, the policing and resources available to check imported building materials are the most complex imported category compared to other imports.”
Despite all these measures, Timson estimates that the illegal trade could comprise up to 10 per cent of timber products entering Australia, undercutting domestic production, regional businesses, and communities.
Free trade agreements
According to Thomson the free trade agreements are not tough enough on timber labelling.
“Timber may be labelled as coming from China but the original source of the timber may be another country,” he says. And there’s timber coming from China without chain of custody certification, he added.
China looks like it’s the main beneficiary from the destruction of tropical rainforests in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
“Papua New Guinea, the largest exporter of wood products in the Pacific, exported 3.3 million tonnes of wood – equivalent to 326 Eiffel Towers – in 2019, a haul worth US$690 million – 90 per cent of these logs are exported to China,” The Guardian reported in 2021.
According to Global Witness, “Virtually all of the Solomon Islands’ timber is exported to mainland China, and indeed this small group of islands is the country’s second biggest source of tropical logs, after Papua New Guinea. The two countries supply half of China’s tropical log imports and we found widespread risks of illegality in both countries’ forest sectors.”
Then there’s the trade of the timber into Australia from China.
In 2021, China exported $1.28 billion to Australia under the category “other furniture” which includes products made or partly made with timber.
Thomson says the federal government has procurement policies but these are undermined by a number of Free Trade Agreements that the government has signed that allow loopholes.
The guidelines, he says, are “are only guidelines, they are not the rules because of Free Trade Agreements”.
“It all comes down to the dollar,” Thomson says.
In a time of climate emergency, tropical rainforests are being destroyed at unprecedented rates and Australia’s trade is central to this devastation and it looks like those free trade agreements are implicit in the ecocide that’s underway on a global scale.