Wood Companies Look to RFID to Raise Yield, Reduce Carbon Footprint

"By using the traceability services being developed by TietoEnator in cooperation with the Swedish Environmental Research Institute," Puntanen told attendees, "we can allocate the environmental burden for products on the item level, and calculate the carbon footprint of a product." Most systems for determining carbon footprints are based on averages, he noted. However, he said, with the use of RFID, the carbon footprint can be computed accurately at the item level, because information regarding carbon emissions at each stage of production can be tracked and analyzed.

Other pilots to be launched will be held in France, with French sawmills Smurfit Kappa Rol Pin and Ducerf. The projects will focus on improving stock management and reducing manual checking with the help of RFID, and the two sawmills will provide data for the system to analyze.

Indisputable Key partners have been developing the hardware and software necessary to make the pilots possible. Finnish independent technical research institute VTT—in cooperation with Confidex and Tampere University of Technology—is developing the project's RFID tags and interrogators, which will be compliant with EPCglobal standards. TietoEnator is currently working on software modules, while the Swedish Environmental Research Institute is developing the system for measuring carbon footprints.

According to Puntanen and Sirkka, the tags under development will most likely be nail-shaped and shot into logs. The readers will be housed in waterproof, impact-resistant casings, and will be small enough to be integrated onto a harvester—a heavy-duty machine used to fell trees and cut off limbs. They must also be adapted for reading tagged logs carried by forwarders and others trucks.

At the end of the pilot phase in August 2009, Puntanen said, the complete system is not expected to be market-ready. Still, he hopes to continue developing the system with partners, and said the methodology for calculating the item-level carbon footprint should be well developed at that point.