A European Union-funded project launched in 2006 to develop a system for analyzing the forestry supply chain will move into the final pilot phase next spring, project leaders at Finnish forestry IT service provider TietoEnator reported Wednesday at the RFID Journal LIVE! Europe conference in the Czech city of Prague.
The 29 project partners aim to lay the groundwork for improving the use of wood and optimizing forest production while minimizing any harmful environmental impact. Passive RFID tags on logs will be interrogated, providing real-time data that can be utilized to improve yield and logistics, as well as reduce waste—all through better supply chain transparency. After logs are processed and the initial RFID tags they carried are destroyed, partners will rely on Data Matrix 2-D bar-coded labels applied to wood products to identify each item. They will also test the use of RFID and 2-D bar-coding to help calculate the carbon footprint of individual wood products.
The three-year project, known as Indisputable Key, received €12 million ($15.3 million) in funding, including €7.7 million ($9.8 million) from the European Union. The rest of the money was provided by project partners such as research institutes, universities, industrial developers, and forestry and sawmill companies, hailing from Estonia, Finland, France, Norway and Sweden.
Companies involved in the wood-production supply chain currently generate information regarding the raw wooden material, but do not share all of that data with one another. Consequently, some €5 billion ($6.4 billion) worth of raw wooden material are wasted in Europe every year, according to Ville Puntanen, a team leader at TietoEnator, and Antti Sirkka, a business intelligence architect.
Using both RFID tags on logs and 2-D bar-code labels applied to finished wood products, the Indisputable Key project will develop a system to trace wood throughout the supply chain. The work will be conducted in five separate pilot projects.
In one pilot, partners in Sweden will insert a nail-shaped RFID tag into logs, then track them to gain a better understanding of how sawmills can improve yield. In many cases, sawmills are unable to locate the desired logs immediately, and thus lose time spent searching for them. In this test, partners will also track the boards labeled with 2-D bar codes, to determine each board’s carbon footprint. The computer system will compile data collected via RFID with information associated to the board’s bar-coded ID, and calculate the environmental impact of that board’s production.
“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.