Ecology

TRACKING TIMBER: COULD NEW TECHNOLOGY HELP CLEAN UP THE SUPPLY CHAIN?

The prized tropical hardwood merbau was once found in abundance from east Africa to Tahiti. It is beloved of homebuilders and furniture stores around the Asia-Pacific region, but, thanks to decades of merciless logging, today only New Guinea holds enough to be harvested in commercial quantities.

Verifying that merbau, which fetches about $2,500 a cubic metre on the open market, is genuinely sourced from sustainably forested areas, either in Papua New Guinea or West Papua in Indonesia, gives the conscientious buyer an almighty headache. But it is also proving a boon for wily technology companies.

Tracking timber

In 2007, Simmonds Lumber, a wholesaler based in Sydney, became the first company in the world to trial a new technology involving DNA sampling and testing. Developed by DoubleHelix, based in Singapore, and certification body Certisource, the technology involves checking wood fibres against the genetic code of trees known to exist in sustainably managed areas.

As a business that imports more than 50 containers a month of merbau into the country, mainly from Indonesia, it was essential to ensure that the wood was coming from where its suppliers claimed, explains John Simon, chief executive at Simmonds Lumber. “The trickiest thing about importing from Indonesia is ensuring that the paperwork is correct and not, as we say in Australia, bodged up.”

And, at least according to Simon, the Double Helix DNA tracking system provides a higher standard of proof than that offered by either the Forest Stewardship Council or the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification, both of which he says focus on auditing company processes, not authenticating individual shipments.

Source:http://www.procurementprofessionals.org/tracking-timber-new-technology-help-clean-supply-chain/