Japan is the world’s the fourth largest importer of wood products, after China, the United States, and the European Union. Much of Japan’s timber imports come from countries or regions with a known prevalence of illegal logging, such as Malaysia’s Sarawak state, Indonesia, or Russia, or as finished products from China, itself the world’s largest […]
The Russian Far East (RFE) contains the world’s last major strands of old-growth temperate forests, a unique, biodiverse ecosystem which is home to the last 500 Siberian tigers in the wild. EIA’s investigative reports detail how demand for hardwood furniture and flooring in the United States, the European Union (EU), Japan, and China have fueled […]
The evidence against Lumber Liquidators, the U.S. wood products company currently under investigation by U.S. federal authorities for alleged violations of the U.S. Lacey Act, continues to accumulate. Senior executives of the Russian timber company “Beryozoviy,” which supplied high value timber to Lumber Liquidators, were found guilty by a Russian court in December 2014 […]
In a visual representation of EIA’s multi-year investigation of illegally harvested timber from the Russian Far East (RFE), we track the value of Mongolian Oak as it moves along the supply chain–from biodiverse forests in the Russian Far East, through manufacturing sites in China, and ultimately to retailers in the U.S. At every stage of […]