Exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested
chalmers.se
chalmers.se
No further news were heard about it. There were even a startup that would use DNA to certify the origin of the wood, allowing traceability.
The "efforts to halt trade in illegal timber such as the EU Timber Regulation and the US Lacey Act" can greatly contribute to reduce this process: harvesting those trees isn't cheap, and without buyers paying large sums to aquire it, it becomes non-profitable.
[0] in Portuguese: https://exame.com/brasil/bolsonaro-diz-que-revelara-paises-q...
Hardwood floors cleans better too, more hygienic. Hard to put into words.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_flooring#Finishing,_buffi...
Usually oils would be combined with some other varnish, especially on a floor, because they offer nearly zero abrasion or water resistance. You'd think oil finishes like boiled linseed oil or tung oil would offer some water protection because of the oil but they don't. Better than wax or nothing but much worse than varnishes.
This is a table from a book on my shelf by Bob Flexner on the subject, Understanding Wood Finishes. It's a good reference https://imgur.com/a/TzacsLs
[1]: https://www.rubiomonocoatusa.com/blogs/blog/what-is-hardwax-...
As a side note, I like the low VOC aspect. I've used pure tung oil from Woodcraft before and it doesn't have a strong smell but it give me the absolute worst headache I've ever had. Worse than any exposure to a varnish or paste wax or something I know has VOCs in it.
Good luck with that product, it looks very interesting!
We asians figured this out generations ago.
Taking your shoes off is absolutely not a uniquely asian thing.
American culture? Way too many movies I've watched feature americans wearing shoes while lying down on their beds. Always weirded me out.
I'm sure you can guess by the way I say it which end I'm at.
I wear shoes around my house because if I don't, as a home-worker, I don't wear shoes very often, and then my feet and ankles start to get painful. I try to segregate indoor and outdoor shoes, but am not very successful at this, and have yet to find slippers which are supportive enough.
https://www.floorcity.com/collections/calypso-laminate-floor...
Vinyl, on the other hand, is completely different, and is unlikely to survive daily use in serviceable state for more than 20 years, typically even less than that.
You're describing engineered hardwood, which ironically often cost more than regular hardwood.
Vinyl luxury plank can be very nice, durable, flexible, thin but with backing to make it quiet and gives it a good feel to walk on, waterproof etc.
I installed much myself and choose based on quality not price and went with VLP for our needs. I think it really just comes down to where you are installing and its characteristics and what materials you have around you.
Also laminates can’t be refinished, nor vinyl. There are some interesting bamboo options out there but frankly VLP these days doesn’t gas off tons of toxic fumes for years, lasts long enough, and is cheap and easy to install and looks real enough these days you’d have to really study it to notice a pattern that unless you really need real it’s good nuff.
Something like a spilled glass of water or puddle from wet shoes, if not noticed immediately and wiped up, can permanently ruin the floor.
That's pretty hard to do on modern vinyl floors. Vinyl gets a bad rap because there were a lot of low end bad products, now there are some amazingly durable options.
Have you ever redone flooring? Because there's definitely waste when hardwood floors are refinished. Arguably equal to replacing a segment of PVC flooring.
But... The amount reflooring we do, it's not even a concern. Even if PVC comes from oil - flooring has years of service and isn't burned for fuel. It's what we call "durable goods". Quality PVC flooring doesn't scratch easily and doesn't require polyurethane refinishing.
Reducing animal sourced food consumption would have a bigger impact, than abstaining from PVC floor planks.
I'm saying that PVC or laminate flooring(much more common) is absolutely not a concern for climate change. "They come from oil" is an illogical argument for durable goods.
In addition - when you cut a part of the hardwood flooring, your new piece will not look the same without a lot of work. Specially for hardwood flooring that is more than a few decades old.
I mean if you care about waste single family homes are very inefficient.
Vinyl is cheaper, stronger, less prone to scratches than wood, more water resistant, and requires minimum maintenance and upkeep cost. Vinyl is also recyclable...
maybe I'm top 1% neurotic about these things but I can tell from Zillow images alone. And definitely by feel of walking on them and the distinct noise they make. There's no comparison.
I seriously doubt they are indistinguishable for most people, but I could be very wrong, especially since so many people go for them.
Natural gas fireplaces aren't real wood-burning, and I can tell, but I just appreciate that they are way cleaner.
Now, furniture is a different story. Wood is much better than the engineered crap. Try lifting a modern piece that looks like wood and maybe has a thin layer of wood (very heavy and easy to damage) and then try lifting something made of real wood (light and strong).
Hardwood floors, tile roofs, ceramic freestanding bathtubs, and loose stone or brick pathways are never not worth the investment.
Another case where real wood provides no extra utility, to me. My furniture does not get tossed around, it does not need to be “strong”.
Have to disagree here. Even at a glance they're totally different.
I'm not sure vinyl is indistinguishable from real hardwood, but I'd take it over a worst-of-both-worlds compromise.
1. It requires less hardwood (rare) for the veneer, and uses softwood (plentiful) for the plywood base. 2. It can be milled exactly to one thickness. Generally with solid hardwood floors you need to sand after installing to get everything into one plane due to moisture movement in the hardwood warping and twisting it. 3. It can be applied in wider planks. Wide solid hardwood floors tend to cup and contract and leave gaps after installation. The plywood base in engineered planks is cross laminated so that it is more stable and resist moisture changes
Does Brazilian Hardwood flooring actually mean the type of flooring Brazilians have or just simply that the hardwood being used as flooring is from Brazil?
Years ago tracking lumber from harvesting through the supply chain was one of the few convincing cases I heard for blockchain applications, where you have a sequence of people who don't trust each other and buyers want verification that the group cutting the trees was really only cutting and selling the amount they were allowed to. Haven't heard any more on that recently.
EDIT - took a look for updates and I see the FSC has a "FSC Blockchain Beta pilot program"
Take the area of land we're willing to give over to lumber farming, divide by how long it takes to grow a tree to harvest and that's how much lumber demand can be met. Adjust price to make demand meet that limit.
Much more complicated
Trees grow in an ecosystem
They are not widgets
I did not think that was true.
My opinion was that almost any useful tree can be grown in some sort of plantation
But talking with foresters I encounter (not many) it seems ecological considerations are along way down the priority list
So not that we cannot, but we will not
Have you more information?
Could one of those countries be China? In Madagascar a decade ago, the felling of hardwood trees (even in supposedly protected national parks) was said to be largely driven by the Chinese furniture industry, and often when I passed a logging operation while cycling, there were Chinese overseeing the work. Considering Brazil–China trade links, no surprise if the then-president didn’t want to rock that boat.
I used black locust for a large porch and am very pleased with it.
Also, it doesn't grow large, often because it's so susceptible to disease. So there's that, too.
Wikipedia says "It is very resistant to rot" and "In the Netherlands some other parts of Europe, black locust is one of the most rot-resistant local trees".
That has to be part of the issue, right?
Most agricultural crops have a very short seasonal window in which they can be harvested, but corn is not expensive because we only get one harvest per year, lumber is an anomaly in that respect.
The longer, clearer, and straighter you need tbe wood the worse black locusts becomes.
You’ve also pointed out the problem with plastic. It fades and if you were to add new plastic it would look off.
They’re fine for certain people I guess but I don’t like how they look. And if you ever have to replace a part it will look weird as the deck will be faded except the new part.
I've noticed that as well on plastic decks I've been on. They feel bad on feet and seemingly get hotter than wood (but that could be an illusion).
That is a pretty broad statement so perhaps you're thinking of a different thing than me when you say "treated wood", but the typical pressure treated pine you get at big box home improvement stores will absolutely rot. They reformulated the treating agent in 2004 so it's no longer using arsenic, and since then pressure treated wood just doesn't last as long. Generally in my area, fences and decks built with standard pressure treated pine look good for about 6 months, then look bad for 5 years, then start to fall apart.
I don't know what this plastic wood is tbh, but I'm having a hard time imagining any plastic surface looking good after 5 years of rain, sun, and boots. Maybe if you sand it down annually. I'm not a fan of grinding microplastics into my yard.
It's basically combining wood fibres with a plastic resin (instead of lignin as in natural wood), then manufactured with some kind of molding or extrusion process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood%E2%80%93plastic_composite
I will never use real wood for a flat outdoor surface again.
They’re sort of fine but they’ll need replacing just the same, tend to get very hot, hard to change, and are not very flattering.
I ended up doing a kind of 180 and installing Accoya wood, which, geographically and species-wise is about the furthest thing from BL available, but felt to me like a good investment in longevity and thus embodied carbon, even when accounting for the long boat trip(s) to my place.
Just installed it so can’t speak to longevity but encouraged by the 50 year warranty against structural issues caused by fungal decay or rot, or against swell or shrinkage > 2.5%.
I'm out of the loop on current lumber prices.
The amusing thing about Osage is we lived in a subdivision that contained the old boundary of a farm, so all of our neighbors had a row of “problem” Osage orange on their back property line. 18” or bigger, tall and looming. And now I know people who actually want it.
This clonal tree is a menace, and should definitely be harvested for use. The amount of scars I have from their INSANE thorns when young is getting too much to count.
Realistically no-one will tell you that the thing you want to buy is illegally harvested wood. Most sales people won't know, won't understand the question to begin with, and won't care enough to provide the information. And if they do know, incentives go against being honest and transparent. So I doubt this is very useful
It becomes useful if a big enough percentage of potential customers ask this question and if an insufficient answer is given decide to shop elsewhere (at a place that can provide a sufficient answer).
They might tell you if it has been harvested legally though, as that is often a selling point. And if they don't know and can't find out then you could move on to a different supplier.
Brazil is going to go through the same process as Cuba did with mahogany until trade in ipê is banned entirely, except it’s not an island so it’ll be impossible to enforce.
> providence
when what I am sure you meant to say was "provenance". I've heard people talk and ask about the "providence of the data" too much not to leave a comment, I guess! It's not manna from heaven it's just some rows in a database somewhere ;)
I was researching the provenance of a rare book just yesterday so this is particularly embarrassing
Without the documentation being in protective care of God, can it truly be trusted?
- W. Edwards Deming
Anyway, much of the illegal harvesting is due to Brazil’s right wing government actively encouraging people to burn the amazon to the ground.
Though it would be hypocritical, we should treat that as an act of war. The greenhouse effect of that one action is going to cause trillions of damage to coastal cities alone.
Unlike drugs, wood is a bulky cargo.
Sure, you might smuggle a few planks, but you aren't going to manage to smuggle tens of thousands of trucks full unless the government is deliberately turning a blind eye.
If you can't get any provenance documentation, how are you assuming it's harvested illegally?
However I think the exotic wood that makes it to the average lumberyard comes almost exclusively from opportunistic small logging operations that stumble upon on groves of trees and cut them down and ship them out as fast as possible, oftentimes under the noses of the land owners (the state, natural reserves, etc.).
Not saying this exonerates the practice or anything --just that rich folk in Hong Kong/mainland CN aren’t the only ones propping the market.
If we ever fully restore the keys, we’d opt for not-ivory.
I have a more than one hundred years old Austrian piano (made shortly before the start of the First WW), and it still works fine.
yes, i'm sure this is true for 100% of people buying fancy pianos, and "proof of sustainable harvest" isn't at all a loophole that gets used to sustain an illegal ivory trade.
What percentage of FSC-certified wood is illegally harvested?
The species commercially traded as Ipe (Handroanthus spp., Roseodendron spp. and Tabebuia spp.) were submitted by Columbia and Panama last year for inclusion in CITES Appendix II. This submission was accepted, meaning that the international trade in these woods will be subject to strict controls as of 25 November 2024. Any international trade must be accompanied by an export permit issued by a national Management Authority, certifying that the wood was harvested in a manner that is compatible with the long-term survival of the species.
CITES enforcement is no joke and the listing of Ipe in Appendix II is likely to hugely reduce demand, due to the substantial bureaucratic burden and legal risk that importers will be exposed to. Guitarists will be all too familiar with the impact of CITES, following the listing of Rosewood in Appendix II in 2017. Until an exemption for musical instruments was negotiated in 2019, guitars with rosewood fingerboards practically disappeared from the market - the risks for importers and distributors were simply too great to reasonably manage.
https://cites.org/sites/default/files/eng/cop/19/prop/as_rec...
This means that some lapacho wood can have legal origins also
You can have yellow, purple, white, a whole lot of colors.
Pulling down sick trees is sometimes the best thing you can do to help the rest.
The city and the locality was recently accused of cutting down too many trees for numerous reasons/projects. Unless you are adamant, they are quite aggressive about killing things in parkways.
I think it would be better to leave things where they are in "Forest Preserves"... Maybe one day we'll have [unmanaged] old growth forests again.
After the earthquake in 1906 san francisco basically burned down. And that led to all the redwoods on all the bay area mountains being clear cut for wood and lime.
In Henry Cowell state park (and others) you'll find some trees that survived.
One that was cut down is shown in a cross section with the rings marked.
Some rings are marked:
- 1 Birth of Jesus/Modern Calendar Begins
- 105 Chinese Invented Paper
The redwoods you see now are still giants, hundreds of feet tall. But notice they are clustered in groups around a stump or an empty area where an old-grown redwood used to stand.
it is sort of like walking in a graveyard.
Turns out there is a way, used mostly since the last decade. And their methodology seems best-fitting, and not a conservative estimation. I'm very positively surprised that 1/4 of the ipê wood sold internationally is legal.
* IKEA faces allegations of aggressively exploiting the last of Romania's ancient forests.
* Ivestigations in the U.S. document IKEA's rush against time to exploit these forests.
* The primary motivation for this deforestation is sheer profit.
* Documented evidence shows complete and illegal clear-cutting of forests under IKEA's direction.
Romania's Forests – Europe's Amazon:
* Romania is home to one of the world's last and largest ancient forests. The Carpathian Mountains in Romania house half of the remaining ancient forests, often termed as the "Amazon of Europe."
Economic Incentives and Unchecked Exploitation:
* Romania's entry into the European Union in 2007 opened markets for its abundant and cheap timber.
Political inefficiency and corruption have enabled unchecked deforestation and exploitation.
Reports suggest that more than half of Romania's timber is exploited illegally.
IKEA's Dubious Role:
* IKEA stands as the world's largest individual wood consumer, its demand growing by about 2 million trees annually.
* In 2015, IKEA began buying vast tracts of forests in Romania, quickly becoming the largest private forest owner there.
* IKEA has been linked to suppliers involved in illegal wood acquisitions, including notable names like Kronospan, Egger, and Schweighofer.
* The company has a pattern of aggressive forest acquisitions and connections with both legal and illegal suppliers, not only in Romania but also in countries like Ukraine and Russia.
LGBTQ+ Campaign as a Distraction:
* IKEA's promotion of LGBTQ+ rights is portrayed as a smokescreen to divert attention from its environmental and corporate malpractices.
* The promotion of LGBTQ+ ideologies, while noble in other contexts, is seen here as a corporate strategy to overshadow their illicit activities.
IKEA's Ideological Dominance:
* IKEA is not just a neutral space; it's portrayed as an ideological stronghold.
* There have been instances where employees were allegedly fired for not conforming to IKEA's political stance. * A Polish court had to intervene to reinstate an employee terminated on such grounds.
A Moral and Environmental Dilemma:
* Romania faces a choice: to focus on rampant deforestation and exploitation by giants like IKEA or to be sidetracked by ideological debates while being economically and morally overshadowed by such corporations.
See https://r3media.ro/ikea-distrugerea-ultimelor-paduri-secular...
Progress is being made on synthetic materials. My cello and bass bows are all carbon fiber. Carbon fiber instruments are gradually improving.
Last time I bought some pine lumber for a project at Home Depot there was a bunch from New Zealand and a bunch from USA, the stuff from New Zealand was cut to much better precision.
I'm far from an expert, but I am in the process of planning our hardwood harvest in Vermont. The northeastern US produces a lot of hardwood and my impression is that very little of it is "farmed".
Can you point to sources? My attempt at searching didn't produce much either way. If you are right, I'd love to update my false impression. Or are you possibly confusing "hardwood" with "softwood", such as pine?
So many people here are outraged, how many of you are supporting on the ground teams protecting rainforests?
If you care, do your research, support causes like https://www.junglekeepers.org (disclaimer here; that is the one I know, work for and support) and don't use exotic woods.
Workers in the mill are the ones who will die or suffer significant trauma when the blade hits the spike.
> Alexander later filed a lawsuit against Louisiana-Pacific claiming that the band saw had been weakened from previous strikes with nails, but that he was forced to work with the saw or face dismissal.
I hate cutting down trees. But at the same time wood seems like a way to sequester carbon from the atmosphere into things that will last a very, very long time. It seems like I could build carbon-negative furniture out of wood, as opposed to carbon-positive furniture out of other materials. As long as those trees are re-planted. I want assurance that when I buy lumber it's regenerative.
If you're concerned, you can always plant a tree or two somewhere for every project you do that uses wood. There are lots of places that let you plant trees even outside your own property.
As for complaining, you started it. (Unless you're claiming the article itself is useless complaining when they could do something to help the problem, but "plant a tree" is not something that could help this problem.)