Is forest certification working?

Print companies’ claims of carbon neutrality might be the latest green marketing fad, but the main sustainability concern in the industry remains the source of the paper itself, says Two Tomorrows executive chairman Mark Line

In my last column I raised the question of carbon neutrality and whether its use by print companies in their marketing stacks up. While carbon claims might be the latest green marketing fad, the main concern in the print and paper industry remains the source of the paper itself. Print buyers and consumers want reassurance that the paper they are buying is not associated with any environmental sins.

Globally, commercially exploited forests cover an almost unimaginably large surface area and patterns of ownership vary from country to country. In some regions, forest ownership is dominated by huge government or private sector-owned operations, while in others, there are thousands of small family-owned plots that might only be cut once a generation.

Given the complex nature of global forestry, what hope is there of developing a common approach to assuring the integrity of the paper supply chain? The term ‘conflict-free fibre’ captures the problem nicely, but is it ever possible to offer that assurance?

Problem solved?

Forest certification has the potential to provide the solution. The FSC has done more than most over the past 20 years to promote an internationally recognised set of standards for forest management and a whole industry has grown up around the desire for responsible forestry.

So, any product carrying the FSC logo can therefore be guaranteed to be ‘conflict free’, right? In fact, it’s not quite that simple.

There are a range of FSC logos available that can be applied to a product, but only the FSC 100% logo means that the originating forests comply with FSC’s standards with a certified chain of custody to ensure that only fibre from that source is in the labelled product.

Less than 10% of the world’s forests are certified to any standard, including a range of competing certification schemes. Put simply, there just isn’t enough 100% certified paper to meet the growing demand for ‘good’ paper. So in recent years FSC has developed a number of other logos and most notably the concept of Mixed Source paper. In Mixed Source paper, only a relatively small proportion of the paper might have come from a certified source. The rest has been judged as meeting a second set of minimum acceptable standards, which allows it to be identified as ‘controlled’ wood. In theory, the definition of controlled wood should address most of the concerns that lie behind the concept of ‘conflict free’. To achieve global scale in the uptake of its standards, FSC has developed its range of logos based upon varying proportions of certified, controlled wood and recycled content.

I see three problems with this approach: firstly, I doubt that even the most informed consumers fully understand the complexity of the various labelling concepts or the meaning of the underlying terms of ‘certified’, ‘controlled wood’, ‘mixed source’ or ‘chain of custody’.

Furthermore, the move to controlled wood as an acceptable component of some FSC labelled products raises for me the spectre of whether the certification industry has adequate controls in place to stop unacceptable wood getting into the supply chain. The race for scale can be dangerous and just one high-profile incident of the system failing could be enough to do immense damage to the FSC brand.

Thirdly, if the current challenge is to achieve scale, why has there been no serious move to achieve harmonisation between FSC and the small number of other credible certification schemes that have developed, such as PEFC? For sure there are some differences, but there is also a very significant level of alignment between a number of schemes that have gained traction globally.

The way I see it, there is still much to play for in establishing a global approach and I think the print industry – and particularly print buyers – could play a more active role in shaping the future labelling landscape. By simply taking what the market is offering, it may well be that the products you sell will not provide consumers with the reassurance that they seek.

First published in Print Week on 29/1/09. Reproduced with kind permission.