In the US, you would sue the person you paid (who would then sue the middleman company who sold them the wood, and so on down the chain until the chain eventually ends).
It’s interesting to think what a market would look like if we removed indemnity and limitation of liability from contracts (which allows liability to easily be passed down to vendors) in certain cases. I think that’s how it works in certain other countries.
E.g. what if the liability was solely with the person who sold me the wood (even if they’re actually “innocent” and simply bought from a fraudulent distributor).
I can easily see how it would help to keep all liability at the closest link to the consumer in the chain, but then again how realistic is it that any home builder is going to (reasonably) be able to do enough vetting of distributors and suppliers to know exactly how and where everything was made.
So they're actively incentivised not to bring attention to it.
Pretty much the only cases they charge are those involving endangered or critically endangered exotics (as defined by CITES). See, e.g, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/gibson-guitar-corp-agrees-res...
Things like underpriced "relatively normal" lumber due to illegal logging are usually handled as any other trade war.
In this particular case it's actually particle board so end customers were likely completely unaware it was illegally sourced.
What provides decent coverage is that nobody is going to charge and convict you.
They only charge the cases with intent in practice.
I know a guy who got screwed over something like that.
Enforcement of this kind of stuff has to happen much higher in the supply chain, e.g. by criminal prosecution of the importers for breaking the law, not civil claims by homeowners.
But yes, you could sue someone if there is false advertising happening.
If I buy wood from someone saying everything is ethically sourced, and it’s not, that’s more than enough for a lawsuit.
The “damage” I suffered is that now I need to rebuild my house because it doesn’t use the wood I thought I bought. (Obviously no one would do that in practice, but that’s how these lawsuits work)
In Jacob & Youngs, the homeowner contracted for a house with Reading-brand pipes but received a house with pipes of equal quality from a different manufacturer. The homeowner argued that they had suffered a “damage” because the builder failed to deliver what was specified. However, the court ruled that the cost to completely replace the pipes (tearing down walls, rebuilding, etc.) was disproportionate to the actual harm suffered, as the non-conforming pipes were functionally identical. Instead of awarding the cost of replacement, the court awarded damages based on the difference in value, which was negligible.
Applying this principle to your hypothetical: • If you contracted for ethically sourced wood but received non-ethically sourced wood, courts would first examine the actual damage caused by the substitution. • If the wood is of the same quality and functionality, courts might determine that the damages are limited to the difference in value (if any) between the ethically sourced wood and the non-ethically sourced wood, rather than the cost of rebuilding the house.
While a lawsuit for false advertising could succeed, the remedy would likely not extend to the drastic measure of requiring a house rebuild unless the difference in the wood’s sourcing directly caused a significant, material harm (e.g., structural failure or a substantial decrease in value).
The case emphasizes that remedies for breach of contract or misrepresentation are not always as sweeping as they might seem; they are often tempered by considerations of fairness and proportionality.
I would also guess new wood flooring installations has long constituted a very small proportion of flooring installation, with the more common material being some kind of plastic/laminate/synthetic or even tile.
Actual solid wood plank floors would only be found in high-end custom homes now (though it was common in even middle-class tract/spec homes up until the 1970s or so, when wall-to-wall carpet became popular. For example my parent's suburban bi-level which was an extremely common middle-class house built in the 1960s has solid oak flooring except for the kitchen.)
I know of at least one New England house with softwood pine floors from the 1850s that still look gorgeous. They needed a serious sanding about 50 years ago, and they have been revarnished a few times the half century since. Give 'em five good coats of varnish every 20 years, and put rugs on the high-traffic walkways, and they'll last for generations.
Meanwhile, linoleum starts looking sketchy after a decade and carpet is just awful.
That's exactly the problem, isn't it? If any middle class person can afford high-quality wood flooring for their middle-class house, you need something exotic for your mansion. Right?
You know what's crazy? I've got stacks of white oak and black walnut firewood. No furniture maker or woodworker will touch a felled tree in suburban or urban areas because it might have a nail somewhere in it. People will cut it into log lengths with a chainsaw and then beg others to come take it - as much as you can fit in your truck. For free.
PS - unless I'm missing something, solid oak flooring is still in the same pricing ballpark as engineered wood flooring, often times a bit cheaper. It's the labor cost for installation and then finishing that makes it pricier overall?
Nails aren't a big deal. Everyone is running carbide blades these days and you won't even know you hit nails. Nail content is more of a long term wear problem.
What pisses sawmill operators off is gate hardware and/or stupid ornate cast iron plant pot hanger that someone stuck up there 100yr ago.
The real problem with getting wood from suburbia isn't the metal it's that the cost of operating everything you need to operate to work efficiently just doesn't pencil out unless you're getting full truck loads of logs. Second, the lumber you'l get is rarely in a good shape. Suburban trees tend to have lots of space to grow and find sun. They're not shooting straight up at the canopy like forest trees are. Demand for ornate slabs is tiny compared to good straight grained lumber.
Milling lumber doesn't really pencil out except as a giant industrial operation or small scale cash only side gig.
Linoleum is a high quality product made from natural materials, you’re thinking of vinyl flooring. Well maintained linoleum flooring can last 40 years easily.
I’m not a conservationist but I don’t think it’s proper to cut down trees only to waste it on flooring if the replenishment of the tree species cannot be accomplished.
With that said, I think all floors should be made out of bamboo.
Using renewable wood for flooring is a carbon sink for the lifetime of the building, which can be a hundred years or more in New England. And like I said, I know of one softwood floor from the 1850s that's still gorgeous enough to photograph. And that wood had been abused over the century plus—it had been painted badly, and the building had been outright abandoned for a while.
Laminate and engineered wood is unlikely to see more than a quarter century without clever care, because you can't actually sand the wood. If you never let it wear down to the wood, I suspect you can carefully hand-sand, and bond varnish to varnish, and buy an extra 20 years each time if you never delay a refinishing. But that's just a guess.
I don't expect most contractors to have any wording around ethical sourcing, and I expect they'd balk at me trying to add an ethical sourcing guarantee to our contract.
If you got the flooring you paid for and it is of the promised quality, you don't have a legitimate complaint.
If the authorities were to seize your flooring because it's made of illegal wood, or fine you because of that situation, then you would have damages.
I would think provenance is part of the promised quality.
Why would the liability stop with them and not you? If only the last person in the chain is liable, the shouldn’t it be you who is sued by the people whose land was exploited for lumber?
It's not like elephant ivory - the wood can come from a number of places and look about the same. As an end user you asked for "wood floors" and you got wood floors, and it was up to the supplier to select the wood used in the flooring, while the supplier is also lying about the source so all parties post-supplier have deniability here, no?
If you disclose it as a material defect, then no they can’t sue you.
[0] https://dos.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2024/03/dos-1614-f...
Or: who could sue you, to return the wood?
> When contacted, AHF told Mongabay in an emailed response that it “does not use any illegally harvested wood products.” “We have a rigorous supplier vetting and compliance program to verify all wood products are legally sourced. Any inferences to the contrary are simply not true,” AHF said.
There's a bit of a he-said/she-said thing going on here. It seems like it would be pretty easy to verify samples whether the wood came from a plantation or not.
* sanctions, you say? what are sanctions?
The reality on the ground is just like any lucrative illegal activity, such as drugs: it is run by violent mafia cartels. The cartels bribe senior national politicians, terrorize/bribe local officials and threaten communities. Rival gangs often have shoot-outs in remote forest areas. Many poor/desperate young men who join the lumberjack crews never come back. The bodies will never be found.
Not always. Sometimes corruption is enough for the business to trive. (see eastern europe).
I hope to visit Cambodia someday (I was about to do it in 2 weeks but then somehow I got tricked into taking a new job :-\).
100% do not bother with going to Sihanoukville or Koh Rong... totally ruined eco disasters.
Frankly, I found the towns in Northern Laos to be more enjoyable, but the roads are so terrible it makes getting anywhere a real challenge and it isn't like you can go exploring off the beaten path there... tons of unexploded bombs.
It's a big place here in Canada and the crown (aka the gov) owns all the land not owned by private owners, First Nations peoples, corporations do not. The US government hates that so they set a tariff.
Funny there are no US tariffs on Canadian oil drilled for on crown land though. Even Trump said no to that. lol
Two problems with that line of thinking:
1) US is a net exporter of oil, so why engage in dastardly invasions to get it from elsewhere?
2) Talk of military industrial complex is often backed u by how much the US spends on defence. However, absolute dollar amounts are a really dumb way to compare defence budgets. They ignore country sizes, GDP sizes and purchasing power. Now, if you compare defence spending per person as a percentage of GDP, accounting for purchasing power parity, you get a much less flawed way to compare between countries. In other words, it's not enough to compare $100 of spending between US and Russia, for example, without accounting for the difference between what $100 buys in the US vs Russia, and how much of a person's annual output that $100 amounts to. US cracks the top 10 on that metric BTW, but just about.
For example, the US has the benefit of printing money in ways that other countries don't. I'm not even sure how you'd adjust military spending to account for the benefit of printing fiat as the world reserve currency, its more like you're playing a game that no other country is allowed to play.
Zero garbage is just sent elsewhere to be dealt with in some random way.
https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/wood-products...
Then what about running the wood genetic sequencing labs in source countries. Explain how these developing countries are going to undertake a DNA based quality system for a highly fungible commodity so we can feel good about wood flooring.
Trying to do that with tariffs creates a situation where only domestic companies are able to break the rules--which of course they're going to do domestically. I don't want to buy things that are harming Cambodia, but substituting them with things that are harming America is not any better.
If we are considering domestic companies that are willing to break the law, neither tariffs nor regulations works. A company can smuggle to bypass tariffs, and they can ignore regulations.
It's just nice because it's verifiable at any point in the supply chain without requiring oversight at every point. You'd only have to pay for the sequencing:
- when adding a new cultivar to the list of ones that are legal to sell
- during sting operations
The threat of being fined/jailed should be enough to get the market to police itself. No need to add bureaucracy in the middle.
I guess it’s a dead horse though since clearly this kind of cognitive dissonance has handed all branches of US government to those advocating for tariffs and the same populist sentiment is well on its way in the EU.