Economic and environmental impact assessment of proposed bark-free requirements for wood pallets in international trade

Charles Ray, John Janowiak, Judd Michael and Hrabrin Bachev ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In 2004 the European Commission issued Directive 2004/102/EC which, among other things, introduced the concept of requiring wood packaging materials to be “debarked.” While previous research has established that as many as one in five North American wood pallets contain at least one occurrence of bark, the process changes required to eliminate or segregate barky defects from pallets have not been adequately defined or quantified. Simulation-based findings as described in this paper indicate that the proposed EC regulation could add $2.7 billion over 10 years to the cost of U.S. pallets alone as they enter international trade markets, and depending on the degree of universal adoption of bark-free regulation, could result in as much as 16 billion additional board feet of lumber being consumed, again in U.S. pallet production alone. Labor, administration, and environmental costs dwarf the capital costs required to make this process transition. The largest potential cost, however, may come in the form of product substitution, as product manufacturers convert to alternative shipping platforms to avoid potential quarantine and return-of-product risk.

Keywords: pallets; phytosanitary regulation; bark-free; EU policies; transaction costs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F2 F4 F42 F5 F53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Forest Products Business Research 6.4(2007): pp. 1-25

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/99615/1/MPRA_paper_99615.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:99615

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().