I'm Jason Epperson. This is RV Miles, and it's time for the latest in RV and camping news.

First up, a UK-based environmental nonprofit Earth site has released the results of an investigation

that it says reveals the RV industry as the largest user of tropical wood leading to deforestation.

The story was picked up by the New York Times and has been circling many mainstream media outlets. Luan plywood is made from wood from the Luan tree,

a large, fast-growing tropical evergreen tree from Southeast Asia. It's lightweight, somewhat water-resistant,

and it comes in different thicknesses.

Quarter-inch and eighth-inch are often used in the RV industry. It's pretty affordable,

and there can be a lot of it in an RV. Earth site says as much as 700 square feet, which is about

22 4x8 sheets. I think they're underestimating it by far. It skins the frame of the sidewalls on

most RV. So it's what the fiberglass is glued to most of the time or laminated to. And it's the

interior walls and ceilings. Just quickly calculating that in my head, I think that could be over 50

sheets in a larger RV. Earthside and their Indonesian

partner organizations say they've been studying one of the top deforested wood suppliers in

Indonesia whose destruction of more than 33,000 hectares of natural forest has been exposed recently.

Looking into where this deforestation wood was going led EarthSight to a California

plywood importer. One of that company's main markets for Luon, they found, was the RV industry.

Digging deeper, it became clear, Earthite says, that this one supply chain was just the tip of the

iceberg. They discovered that the RV industry has turned the U.S.

into the world's largest consumer of Indonesian tropical wood. This was a concern back in my

theater days, too. I used to produce and manage theater productions, and I was the head of a

technical theater program at a major university. The theater industry is a big consumer of

Luan plywood, building most of its scenery

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