Chemotaxonomic and anatomic wood species identification in bleached pulp: blind test and method validation

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the blind test outcomes of two independent methods for the identification of tropical wood species in pulp and paper products. Both, the established anatomical and the relatively new chemotaxonomic method support the European Deforestation Regulation 2023/1115 (EUDR), which aims to ensure that only legally harvested timber that has not contributed to deforestation is traded in the EU. The blind test involved 570 decisions on 15 test sheets of 37 self-manufactured mixed tropical hardwood pulps and an industrial beech pulp, used as a matrix. Both detection techniques demonstrated robust performance with over 80 % hit rates. The results show that the synergies and combination of the strengths of both methods can be utilized and lead to even better combined performance. In order to establish the chemotaxonomic identification method as a complement to the conventional anatomy-based method, statistical analyses were performed to assess its intermediate precision between three different GC-MS systems. In most cases, the method gave consistent results independent of the instrument used.