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A shipment of timber has for the first time been tracked by an electronic
system all the way from its forest of origin in Indonesia to an importer
in Britain.

‘This is an important step towards giving timber buyers the guarantees
of good forest management they are asking for,’ says the system’s inventor,
Bill Miller, who runs his own company, Forests Log, near Witney in Oxfordshire.
‘It is one thing to certify a forest as being sustainably managed, but quite
another to follow the timber from that forest through a complex trading
network and remain certain of its origin.’

Using Miller’s scheme, each log is given a unique bar code, affixed
with a plastic tag which enables the log to be traced through to the sawmill.
A hand-held computer reads the bar code and forestry workers also record
the volume, species and quality of each log. The data can be transmitted
as often as necessary – usually daily – to a central computer by satellite.

The tags are lost when the logs are processed into planks or another
wood product, but the volume of timber going into a sawmill can be compared
with the output. Provided the sums tally, the full data about the wood in
each container is recorded on a steel-housed microchip which will travel
with the wood to its destination, secured under the steel straps around
the shipment. It can then be checked at any time using a remote probe. Each
chip costs about £8, and could record data on container shipments
worth thousands of times more.

‘The ability to trace timber is just one of the benefits,’ says Miller,
whose invention has been taken up by Oxford commodity specialists SGS Forest
Services.

Miller now hopes that his ‘Forest Log’ system will become the standard
means of labelling and tracing internationally traded timber.