Possibilities of using barcode and RFID technology in Thai timber industry.

The Thai timber trade is under increasingly competitive pressure given the international export commitments and simultaneous adherence to a sustainable forest management model, as required by legislation such as the European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade and the European Union timber regulation. Thailand, therefore, needs to build standards that can facilitate traceability in the timber trading system. Timber traceability provides assurance that a certain timber product has been manufactured from legal and sustainable sources. Auto-identification is becoming a common technology in product traceability, particularly the use of barcoding and radio-frequency identification (RFID), which have been used in various industries but is still rarely applied in the forest industry. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the possible application of a barcode and an RFID system in the Thai timber industry and to identify the most favourable technology for traceability. The results indicate that RFID is a more preferable identification method in terms of efficiency and user acceptance. However, the cost of an RFID tag should be reduced to 15 baht/tag or less. Barcodes are not suitable for timber products, at least in the context of the Thai timber industry, even though they are used for other purposes. RFID, on the other hand, provides several benefits throughout the whole supply chain compared with barcodes and other conventional identification systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]