Green Carbon, Black Trade

A key element in illegal logging schemes is the laundering of the illegal timber and other wood products. This is the primary way that illegal logs are transported, pro- cessed and exported or manufactured, thereby bypassing the majority of certification schemes and efforts to avoid illegal imports. LAUNDERING ILLEGAL LOGS AND WOOD PRODUCTS

The laundering of timber or wood products is also where government certification schemes or international agreements are often inadequate. Schemes such as the EU FLEGT Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) are important mechanisms for establishing joint inten- tions and collaboration to prevent imports of illegal tim- ber. However, they are not primarily law enforcement initiatives to combat illegal logging or transnational crime and corruption, and face many challenges regard- ing the actual crime. One of the greatest challenges in combating illegal log- ging is understanding how illegally logged, procured, processed or manufactured wood products are laun- dered and spread to markets in the US, the EU, China and Japan, which together receive over 80 per cent of the world’s illegally logged wood. One common launder- ing scheme is to mix illegally logged logs with legal logs during the forestry operation, at a storage facility for transport, in processing mills, or through resale along with legal cuts. Another increasingly common method is to filter illegal logs through real or “artificial” planta- tions (existing only on paper) – thus selling illegal logs as products of the plantations.

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