The UK is high on the environmental roll of shame as the world’s third largest importer of black market wood products. Only China and Japan buy more illegally logged timber than Britain.
According to the WWF, the UK spends over £712 million a year on wood from criminal sources, two thirds of which is for use in construction, including hardwood flooring. Pirated timber shipped into Britain every year covers an incredible 3.2m cu m. Amazingly, that’s an area the size of Belgium!

Wide-scale deforestation being wreaked by the so-called ‘timber mafia’ is devastating for the indigenous people and wildlife that depend on these forests. The 2.8m hectares of forest being destroyed in Indonesia annually (80% of that illegally) is costing that country over £2 billion a year.
Staggeringly, it has been estimated that the destruction of forests in the Amazon, Congo Basin and Indonesia over the next four years will release more carbon dioxide than every aircraft flight in the history of aviation until 2025!

At last, after years of campaigning by the Environmental Investigation Agency, the WWF, Greenpeace and others, the European Parliament has just banned the import of illegally sourced timber products.
The measure will be presented to a meeting of EU governments, including the UK, in the autumn. Until fairly recently most EU members, Britain among them, were reluctant to act, claiming that an outright ban would be counter-productive. But they are expected to rubber stamp the new regulation following the lead taken by President Obama, recently banning the possession and sale of contraband timber in the USA. Good news is that both parties in the new UK government under David Cameron have pledged to make the possession or import of illegal timber a criminal offence. But there are large sums of money involved in bootleg wood, so penalties will need to be tough and rigidly enforced.

However, the problem in any free market system is that it is difficult to have guaranteed assurance of sustainable and responsible sourcing of timber which comes via third party countries, a number of which are notorious for not properly supervising certification requirements.

Most British specifiers and flooring contractors are aware of the issue and generally look out for evidence that the products they use are from legal and sustainable sources. But there are many stages and entities from forest to floor, including importer, processor, forest company and forest source, and some of those are apparently open to abuse.

Government action is obviously welcome, but vigilance by everyone in hardwood flooring is still as vital as ever. And contractors should caution customers with more cash than conscience against using threatened species like Merbau!

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