A man from the Greater London Authority rang a couple of weeks ago, asking me lots of questions about plywood and the usual stuff on legality and verification, and after a bit of help we even managed to talk sensibly about chain of custody. He seemed very interested and I finished the conversation thinking that we might get a bit of business from them in the future.
Then, last week, there was another Greenpeace exposure moment – shock, horror, plywood used to board up a piece of Trafalgar Square, in their opinion, came from illegal sources, with the arch enemy China as the source of all this stuff. The supplying company was mentioned and of course Ken Livingstone got involved, making reassuring noises about their future performance.
So, not much chance of a sale there to help defray the thousands of pounds we spend a year in congestion charges! They’ve got the information they wanted and it’ll all blow over in due course.
I’d love to know where the Greenpeace spokesperson’s underwear was made, or the laptop that they used to produce the hype and PR material. Not China by any chance? Did they go and check if there was any sign of a sweatshop for any of those goods?
Judging by the previous comments by Mr Livingstone, he wants to go down the FSC-only route, even though Defra has spent millions of pounds of our money to decide that there are other acceptable schemes which are CPET approved.
Even more puzzling is how on earth he thinks that the Olympic building contractors will find all this timber from one scheme, when anyone in the trade will tell him it’s just not possible!
As each month passes, I seem to be getting increasingly cynical about who is driving this agenda and whether they have any idea how difficult it is to run a chain of custody system to distribute timber products. What they’re in grave danger of achieving is the reverse of what we need – other far more harmful building materials used in place of timber.
