Russian timber laundered through China could be sitting behind the plasterboard of new Australian homes, with as much as 100,000 cubic metres of imported timber a year estimated to contain Russian material. That is according to the Australian Forest Products Association, whose acting chief executive Richard Hyett joins Source Certain founder Cameron Scadding on tomorrow’s Beyond the Paperwork webinar.
“The latest evidence suggests significant volumes of Russian timber continue to find their way into the Australian market, despite existing sanctions,” Hyett said as the association pressed the Government to stamp out the trade. Timber that could contain Russian fibre makes up as much as 6 per cent of the equivalent local market, he says, with Australia taking “very limited action” compared with the European Union and the United States.
“Often this timber’s coming into the country certified, which there’s no way that it can be,” Scadding said of Russian fibre, which lost its certification after the invasion of Ukraine. Russian fibre turned up across a series of Source Certain’s projects, including work for the Australian Government, he says, though its presence is not necessarily illegal.
A test starts with the species under the microscope before the stable isotopes locked in the wood point to the country and region where it grew, Scadding explained. Isotope reference data already exists for timber from the Russian resource, and Source Certain’s own trace element test reads a fingerprint from “pretty much the whole periodic table.”
That combination matters in engineered wood, where an LVL beam can hold more than 30 pieces of timber and 30 separate isotope tests are “just not economical,” Scadding says. His laboratory now runs 300 to 400 pieces of timber through a single overnight batch, after two years spent finding a way to confirm the origin of every piece.
Isotope work on its own is slower and dearer, he says, whilst the combined method is “definitely more cost effective” and its price is under downward pressure. A timber test will never be as accessible as “your simple blood test,” Scadding says, but the more of it that is done as a programme, the more cost effective it becomes.
IndustryEdge managing director Tim Woods and University of Queensland resource economist Dr Tyron Venn complete tomorrow’s panel, with Venn’s research finding that the origin of timber is not tracked as it moves through China’s mills. Russian softwood made up 16 per cent of the elevated-risk wood Australia used in the five years to 2022-23, Venn and his co-authors found in a report for the regional forestry hubs.
Since the Senate’s sanctions inquiry, Scadding has watched industry champions emerge among importers and local manufacturers, most of whom want to source timber properly and “get paid properly for it too.” They are finding that “really, really difficult” at the moment, he says, because they compete with product that does not have that integrity.
Source Certain can clean up a client’s supply chain, Scadding says, but the harvest continues because the product simply goes somewhere else. With government intervention layered on top, he believes those testing supply chain by supply chain can “make a really big dent by just getting going and doing something.”
