Source of wood in domestic use

http://grist.org/living/ikea-wont-tell-where-it-gets-its-wood-and-congress-is-about-to-give-it-a-pass/


This is a very interesting link to the issue of how chain of custody in wood supplies keeps us environmentalists guessing.


Not that the wood is necessarily being used in landscaping but reflects the generalised issue with timber.

Small Decks and Sustainability

This is a comment I made earlier this year, in response to an article about building up your decking area outdoors. There are lots of factors to bear in mind, with small gardens and decks, bio-diversity - do we leave room for more than one genus of animal, plant, insect (to mimick natural systems and keep pests under control), urban run-off (having porous surfaces that enable bio-filtration, replenishing of ground-water), trees for shading/wind-breaks/lowering heat-island effect, and space for growing produce/composting.

Watch out for Outdoor Room fads and consider how well these cope with extreme weather events. Timber has lowest carbon foot-print of all decking materials (and C02 sequestration makes it practically carbon neutral except for finishing and maintenance inputs) but the source of all materials must not come from active habitats. Buy locally if you can because decking timber is a top main cause for prize rain-forest destruction next to paper, and palm-oil in countries where chain of custody, forest stewardship may not exist. Natural turf is a fantastic carbon sink, and lawn is child-play friendly. Nicolle Kuna Sustainable Landscape Designer and Blogger

Green The Film

When building an Outdoor Room, ask yourself where is your timber coming from -  watch http://www.greenthefilm.com/ before you decide to use timber from native forests overseas.  As you lounge in your outdoor setting, the lovely orang-utans are languishing and perishing.  

to Honourable Joe Ludwig, Minister for Agriculture.

I sent off a generic letter to Hon. Joe Ludwig, the Minister for Agriculture (via one of the many environmental lobbying groups that come in to my Inbox) adding, one heading:   

Let's slow down the promotion of outdoor rooms which substantially replace gardens. 

When you visit those outdoor room sites, you have to ask yourself how much of the timberused is from a non-sustainable source (a stand of trees hundreds or even thousands of years old, habitat and bio-diversity rich (orangutans), which will take untold generations to regenerate). 

In 2007 and 2010 the Labour Govt made election promises to ban illegal timber imports. The Draft legislation before the Parliament includes 5 years jail for those who overstep the ban.

In a letter to Mr Ludwig, we ask him to include an obligation that importers declare information about the nature of their products.  (After all, without knowing more about the timber itself, how can these laws be enforced?)

Lack of legal chain of custody is the main problem.  The only statistics that we could find are from Wikipedia, which are mostly 7 years old.  ( It isn't surprising how difficult it is to get a figure, given that the activity is hidden!)

A joint UK-Indonesian study of the timber industry in Indonesia in 1998 suggested that about 40% of timber throughput was illegal, with a value in excess of $365 million. More recent estimates, comparing legal harvesting against known domestic consumption plus exports, suggest that 88% of logging in the country is illegal in some way. Malaysia is the key transit country for illegal wood products from Indonesia.  Profiting from plunder. How Malaysia Smuggles Endangered Wood,   2004

Source: Wikipedia, visited 1 August, 2011.