Recovering Wood, Building a Certified Supply Chain

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What we do — and do not do

We hold no land-clearing permits

Taruma does not clear forest. We take no part in any landowner's decision to convert land. Our business is recovery: we collect residual wood left behind by land conversions that are licensed and supervised by the Paraguayan State, wood that would otherwise be burned in the field or left to rot.

In most cases that wood is provided to us at minimal cost, covering little more than the landowner's administrative and tax costs of issuing the transport documents and the upkeep of the internal farm roads our equipment uses. The amounts involved are far below anything that could motivate a clearing decision. Those decisions are made by landowners for agricultural reasons, under a national legal framework that requires an environmental licence, an approved land-use plan, a minimum 25% forest reserve on rural properties, mandatory windbreaks and riparian protection strips. In practice, typically 40% or more of a property remains under forest.

Recovered wood, staged before mechanical extraction

Why recovery matters

Left where it falls

When conversion wood is burned in windrows or left to rot, its carbon enters the atmosphere with nothing to show for it: no product, no jobs, no controls, and, where it is burned, lasting damage to the soil beneath the fire.

Recovered by Taruma

Recovering that material changes the equation. Much of our wood is extracted mechanically and processed at our licensed facility in Mariscal Estigarribia, which operates under a MADES environmental licence with compliance audits approved most recently in November 2025. The result is charcoal for BBQ and cooking, metallurgical fuel that substitutes fossil fuels such as coal and coke in industry in Paraguay and Brazil, and biochar, a permanent carbon sink.

This is the same logic the world applauds in every other recycling industry: take a waste stream, and turn it into value.

Chaco, Boquerón — part of our workforce

People

Every load is documented before it moves

Our operations sustain one of the largest workforces in our part of the Chaco, one of the poorest regions of Paraguay, with a material share of that workforce drawn from indigenous communities.

Every load of wood we recover travels under a guía forestal, the State-issued wood transport certificate recorded in INFONA's system, and every supplier is vetted before we buy: we verify the property's environmental licence, its approved land-use plan, its current standing with INFONA and MADES, and we conduct our own site visits.

“We have compared every property we purchase from against the registered boundary of the Patrimonio Natural y Cultural Ayoreo Totobiegosode; none lies inside it.”

Where a property's position relative to an indigenous land claim cannot be resolved, we do not buy. We apply the principles of free, prior and informed consent in our purchasing procedures.

Where we are going

Recovery is where we started. Certification is where we are going. We have begun transitioning our customers to FSC-certified charcoal, sourced from certified plantations and managed forests through our certified partners, and we are working toward certification of our own operations. The larger goal is to bring Chaco landowners into FSC-certified management of their remaining forest, because standing forest that earns income is standing forest that stays.

We believe the Chaco's future depends on making its forests worth more alive than cleared, and on giving the people who live there work that does not depend on clearing. That is the business we are building.