FSC-Watch

Wall Street Journal exposes FSC policy chaosTags: Worldwide, Indonesia, Mixed sources labelling, Controlled wood, Certifier conflict of interest

The Wall Street Journal today ran the following story, the original of which is available here

FSC's 'Green' Label for Wood Products Gets Growing Pains

By TOM WRIGHT and JIM CARLTON

October 30, 2007

The environmental group that runs a widely recognized labeling system to identify "green" wood and paper products has acknowledged that some companies using its label are destroying pristine forests and says it plans to overhaul its rules...[Continue]

The joke that is FSC's 'Controlled Wood Standard': the laundry is open for businessTags: Worldwide, Mixed sources labelling, Controlled wood, Legality, All certifiers

One of the more controversial of FSC's policies has been the 'Mixed Sources' policy, which allows manufactured products such as plywood, paper and furniture to be labelled as 'FSC' even though the amount of wood fibre from FSC-certified sources is actually as little as 10% of the total wood material in the poroduct.

Quite apart from the fact that such 'Mixed Sources'-labelled products are likely to be seriously misleading to the consumer (following recent changes to FSC's rules, the product labels no longer even have to say how much of the product is actually from FSC-certfied sources), there is also the question of 'what about the remaining uncertified material'? Some FSC members have been warning for years that, in the absence of any meaningful controls, there is a real risk that Mixed Sources products would become a way of 'laundering' wood from unacceptable sources into FSC-labelled products...[Continue]