Trace wood and timber from forest sourcing to recovery, identify environmental and social risks, and find practical opportunities to keep wood in use for longer.
Purpose of the template
Wood can be a renewable and lower-impact material, but only when it is sourced, processed, designed, used, and recovered responsibly. This template helps teams examine one wood material or product across its full supply chain, with attention to certification, deforestation, biodiversity, labour, land rights, chemicals, regulation, and circularity.
It supports more responsible forest sourcing, longer product life, greater use of reclaimed wood, and stronger systems for deconstruction, reuse, recycling, and cascading use.
What is included
The template follows six connected stages:
Forest inputs & management
Harvesting & primary processing
Wood materials & component production
Manufacturing & circular product design
Use, maintenance & market demand
Collection, reuse & recovery
Each stage includes guiding questions and prefilled examples of key risks and opportunities, including forest certification, chain of custody, biodiversity, labour conditions, material loss, low-toxicity specifications, repair, deconstruction, reclaimed-wood partnerships, regulation, and industry leadership.
The final stage feeds back into the first: reclaimed, reused, and recovered wood can become circular inputs for new products.
How to use it
Start by completing the Business profile and Wood profile. Choose one species, wood material, product, or use case—such as oak, pine, plywood, engineered timber, or reclaimed timber—before mapping another.
Work from Stage 1 to Stage 6. Add sticky notes with findings, evidence, suppliers, sourcing locations, unanswered questions, assumptions, risks, and opportunities. Use green markers for opportunities or actions to explore, and orange markers for risks, gaps, dependencies, or requirements.
Finish by reviewing the full chain together. Prioritise the most significant risks, agree the strongest opportunities to reduce virgin-timber use, identify evidence still needed, and assign actions, owners, and review dates.
Suggested workshop
Run this as a 90–120 minute cross-functional workshop.
Before the session, select one wood material or product and gather available information on suppliers, sourcing countries, certification, chain of custody, product design, chemicals, end-of-life routes, and applicable regulations.
Begin by agreeing the scope and completing the two profiles. Then spend around 10–15 minutes on each supply-chain stage, using the prompts to capture evidence, uncertainties, risks, and circularity opportunities. Mark the most important notes as green or orange as you go.
Use the final 15–20 minutes to agree priorities: the most important environmental, social, supply, regulatory, and circularity risks; the most promising interventions; and the actions the business will take, support, or lead.
Who it is for
Use this template with sustainability, procurement, product design, construction, operations, supply-chain, compliance, legal, facilities, and leadership teams. It is also useful in supplier conversations, forest-risk assessments, circular-design workshops, material-strategy projects, and responsible-sourcing reviews.
A starting point, not a complete list
The template is deliberately prefilled with suggestions, example risks, and possible opportunities to make it easier to begin. These are prompts—not fixed answers or a complete checklist. Change, remove, add to, or adapt every element to reflect your wood species, product, geography, suppliers, and business priorities.
What you will leave with
A shared map of the wood supply chain, its highest-priority environmental and social risks, circularity opportunities, key regulations and standards, evidence gaps, and a practical set of actions to reduce impact and build a more responsible, resilient wood system.
