After 11 years of being a major customer both of wood and forest certification schemes, first for B&Q plc and now for the whole Kingfisher group, I understand the importance of certification.
Greenpeace‘s recent demonstration in the Cabinet Office (TTJ April 13) was significant: who would have thought 10 years ago that such a group would be not only be endorsing tropical timber, but buying it? And from where – B&Q! But in this glow, there is a shadow – more thinking needs to be done. It is time, I believe, to seek even more creative ways to not only use certification to continue to protect the market from bad forestry, but also to increase its ability to improve forestry around the world.
These are the thoughts I intend to share at the Forest Leaders’ Forum Conference in Atlanta (April 25- 27). I believe wood can compete even better with less environmentally acceptable materials. This creative rethink will involve how we develop certification. It will also involve the ways we use all the existing certification schemes to help improve forestry and grow the sales of businesses committed to sustainable forestry.
Alarm bells ringing
In 1991, B&Q had no proper information about where its timber was coming from, let alone how it was produced. When a journalist asked how much tropical timber we stocked, alarm bells rang – and the more questions we asked of ourselves and of our suppliers, the louder those bells rang. B&Q alone had over 25 different labels – all trying to reassure our customers that our products were from sound forests. They didn’t!
I couldn’t be certain that our business was not connected to bad forestry anywhere in the world. We needed to work with our suppliers and stakeholders to make changes, effectively rebuilding our entire supply base.
We also helped to create the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), to provide independent reassurance on forestry standards. This remains the best of the certification schemes and has the strongest support.
FSC provides our customers, our buyers and our suppliers’ buyers with three key elements of reassurance. First, the simplicity of one label. They have neither the time nor the skill set to judge what different labels stand for. Second, a label that delivers high forestry and audit standards. The heartwood of a certification system is the standard, and we believe that the FSC standard delivers on all the issues our customers expect us to be concerned about. Third, a label that has strong support from the environmental NGOs.
Our problems of the 1990s have now largely been solved. We have effective systems in place, backed up by certification, to provide reassurance on most issues.
For many of our products, achieving certification took many years – as it was withheld until the high standards in the forest were achieved. Certified products were rare and we had no choice but to wait. We helped grow the market and it is now possible to buy only FSC for most of our range for most of the time.
Economic incentives
This makes it straightforward for us to avoid forests that are not certified. That is great for us – but are we removing the economic incentives for those forest owners to improve? Are they left to supply only purchasers who do not care?
Looking ahead, at least two things are clear. First, despite increasing support for certification large areas of the world’s forest will remain under threat. Second, in our business, wood sales will continue to grow.
B&Q’s vision is ‘to make wood from well-managed forests more competitive than wood from poor or unknown forestry’. This deliberately makes no mention of certification schemes, because certification isn’t the prime focus. The focus is how to use our buying power to drive real improvements in forestry.
We have always said that we would not engage in boycotts, because in doing so we would remove an incentive for positive changes. There is even an argument for saying that companies that have a long-term interest in the quality of forest management should buy, with appropriate conditions and careful monitoring, from the poor areas rather than just the best.
The crucial element here is that we are using our buying power to provide a positive incentive for certification. I am becoming increasingly aware of the potential of this approach, and also that higher standards will generally be accepted if they are phased in over an adequate period of time.
The key is that we will be working with our supply chains to use our buying power to make wood from well-managed forests not only more competitive than wood from badly managed forests, but also more competitive than less environmentally appropriate raw materials.
Imagine a world selling more wood, from forests with higher management standards management. With creative thinking this is within our grasp. That really would be something for us all to be proud of – from foresters to shop keepers!
