20 July 2023
By Bryan McCarthy
bryan@TheCork.ie
Purchasers of wood products enabled to trace wood to original tree
Treemetrics, the Cork headquartered, global leader in forestry management software, has announced it is working on a major project funded by the European Union to develop a system which enables full traceability of wood products. The €9 million SINTETIC project aims to combat deforestation by enabling customers buying wooden products to be able to trace the wood all the way back to individual trees in the European forests they come from.
The Rubicon Centre based Treemetrics was incorporated in 2005 and develops technology and software systems to help analyse, understand and evaluate forests around the world. The company will be centrally involved in developing a digital platform which will allow for complete traceability of all wooden products. The SINTETIC Project follows an EU Directive on Deforestation-Free Products, which obligates companies to ensure their products do not contribute to deforestation.
54 year old Enda Keane, Chief Executive of Treemetrics, said; ‘’The importance of this new EU directive cannot be overstated. We will need full traceability of all wood products in the EU, similar to what we already do with meat traceability. The SINTETIC Project is vital to this issue and it is incredibly exciting for Treemetrics to play a key role in this international project.
We are looking forward to working with our other twenty European partners on the project. The task ahead is enormous, but we have already have a roadmap as to how it will be achieved. Radio Frequency Identification will allow standing trees and round wood to be tagged. A code will be punched onto the wood which will be scanned at the sawmill, with a bar or QR code carried through to the retail process.’’
“SINTETIC will establish an innovative system to trace forest products and interrelate the data generated along the whole value chain. The ambition is to create a service that is paid by the economic benefits it provides to all the players of the forest sector, but that can also generate data and models to better protect and manage the European forests,” highlights the project coordinator Gianni Picchi, CNR researcher and adjunct researcher at CTFC.
The project researchers hope SINTETIC will increase the number of EU forested areas under active management. The project also aims to reduce overall transportation costs and related greenhouse gas emissions by 5% and increasing the yield of high-value sawn wood products.
In 2022 Treemetrics signed a €1.2 million contract with the European Space Agency to utilise satellite imaging, data analytics and its advanced forest measurement technology to provide more accurate forest carbon credit estimates.
Treemetrics has been providing technology-based solutions to the global forestry industry for the past 18 years. The company provides solutions to clients in over 40 countries by utilising mobile applications, remote sensing, data mining and satellite communications technology and tailors them for maximum benefit for the forestry industry.