How does sustainability concern a wood processing company beyond its production?
As a wood processing company, which we clearly are with a sawmill, cooperage, and carpentry shop, we face various challenges. These challenges not only involve educational work or wood procurement but also legal and regulatory requirements.
This important and sometimes idealized topic can quickly lead to a bureaucratic jungle that needs to be navigated – which brings us directly to the keyword “forest”.
Germany boasts the largest forested area of any European country, and yet, or perhaps because of this, all forests enjoy and require special protection. This is implemented not only through measures by local forestry offices or private forest owners but primarily through legal frameworks.
Such laws and regulations often have not just national but European reach and affect not only the forestry industry but also all sectors that process wood and perhaps even import or export it.


What determines wood purchasing?
As a cooperage and carpentry shop with our own sawmill, our starting product is the raw, felled tree trunk. When purchasing wood, there are several criteria we must consider.
Besides the regional origin of our woods, we explicitly look for certifications such as Naturland, FSC, PEFC, etc. . These certificates prove forestry practices committed to cascade use and limited extraction. These concepts guarantee us and ultimately our customers sustainable management.
Sustainability at Wilhelm Eder Company
In our production and along the entire value chain, we also focus on cascade use and strive for a circular economy. This means we recycle all wood, whether already used or not, as often as possible, thus reintroducing them into our production cycle. Our high-quality barrels from the cooperage become unique furniture pieces from our carpentry shop after usage, made to last a lifetime.
Guidelines and principles for our handling of wood
Apart from our method of handling and producing wood products, the German Federal Government and the European Union provide us with regulations and rules that we must respect and implement regarding the sensitive raw material of wood. These rules come into play especially when we want to export goods or import great pre-used barrels.
Legal foundations
I’ve already mentioned a jungle of regulations, and there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Instead, I’d like to outline as simply as possible which laws exist and briefly highlight that while these are certainly meaningful in terms of ecology, they also represent enormous hurdles and many additional work hours for small and medium-sized businesses like ours.
The Timber Trade Safeguard Act („Holzhandels-Sicherungs-Gesetz“)
Since we work with domestic wood in our own cooperage, the Timber Trade Safeguard Act (in German Holzhandels-Sicherungs-Gesetz or short HolzSiG) primarily affects us in our trade with pre-used barrels from third countries – i.e., non-EU member states.
The law aims to prevent the import of illegally logged timber or wood products from illegal deforestation into the EU. In 2003, the EU adopted the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan for these purposes. A corresponding FLEGT licensing procedure is carried out in Germany by the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (in German Bundesministerium für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft or short BMEL). And it’s to this ministry that we are accountable for imports, for example, from the USA.
In addition to proving the entire supply chain, we are obliged to provide complete evidence of the exact origin and proof of legal logging. Besides these proofs, we submit risk assessments and numerous documents. To avoid violating our due diligence, we painstakingly gather all these documents even before the goods are loaded.
On one hand, this greatly minimizes illegal deforestation often associated with human rights violations, which is an enormously important aspect. On the other hand, it’s a huge burden to be able to state exactly where the tree stood from which the barrel for Jack Daniels or Laphroaig was built. After all, not everyone wants to reveal exactly where they source their goods, and sometimes, especially with used barrels that have passed through several hands, it’s almost impossible to obtain reliable documents.
Depending on the business partnership and country, this process can take several weeks to months.


Plant health – Phytosanitary
Wood is considered a sensitive raw material. As an organic material, it runs the risk of biotic infestation (e.g., beetles and fungal diseases) and thus introducing them and endangering native species.
Since no country wants to introduce foreign species through trade, phytosanitary certificates are required here. With this certificate, the supervisory authority confirms the health of the wooden barrels after inspecting them on-site. To rule out infestation, these certificates have a rather short (sometimes varying) validity period of usually 14 days. This period must not be exceeded between issuance, export, and import of the goods. So nothing must be missing, and everything must run smoothly so that we only need to apply for the fee-based certificates once.
This approach is undeniably effective for forest protection, after all, they are to be treated with extreme sensitivity. But here too, the bureaucratic effort is correspondingly present, and sometimes one wonders. These plant health certificates are only mandatory for trade with third countries. Now Austria and Switzerland are just a stone’s throw away from each other…
A look into the future: EU Deforestation Regulation
The EU Deforestation Regulation (“EU-Entwaldungsverordnung” – EUDR) was adopted in May 2023 and aims to reduce deforestation and associated forest degradation worldwide.
It ensures that products sold in the EU are not associated with deforestation. Companies selling certain commodities such as soy, palm oil, beef, wood, cocoa, coffee, and rubber, as well as products made from them like furniture or leather, must prove that these goods do not come from deforested areas.
The regulation requires companies to exercise strict due diligence. This means they must collect information about the origin of the raw materials and prove that they do not come from areas deforested after 2020. They must also provide precise georeferenced data to guarantee full traceability of origins.
This represents a tightening of the Timber Trade Safeguard Act, as not only the country of origin of the wood but also its specific geolocation must be documented in a publicly accessible portal. The aim is to minimize the consumption of products contributing to deforestation in the EU and to make international trade more sustainable.
This is an endeavor of enormous importance for the global total forest area. After all – and this must be said so clearly – such strict regulations in forestry as have long been practiced in Germany exist in very few states.
Medium-sized companies are struggling with the fact that initially, a regulation was adopted with effectiveness at the end of the 2nd quarter of 2025, but without providing the associated instruments. After strong criticism from large companies, but also SMEs, the deadline for implementation was postponed to the end of 2025, in the hope that by then the appropriate tools will have been implemented with which a company can then actually comply with the regulation.


You see, it’s not just about “simply building a few wooden barrels and furniture,” but also always about fulfilling a great duty of care towards the environment.

See you,