B&Q plc, Britain’s largest DIY and garden centre chain, has been involved with the WWF 95+ Group from the beginning, thanks in no small part to the energy of its head of social responsibility Dr Alan Knight, who was awarded the OBE in 1998 for ‘services to environment and business’.

In 2000 Dr Knight was given the same role for Kingfisher and became responsible for co-ordinating policy development and reporting across the entire group. The Kingfisher home improvement group has a total turnover of £5bn, 550 stores and 50,000 employees ‘from Turkey to China’.

B&Q had been shaken into action 10 years ago, said Dr Knight, by the realisation that many of its sources of timber and wood products were unknown. And when it discovered those sources, it found some were unsound and that many sustainability claims were unfounded or unprovable.

The company vowed, he said, that ‘deforestation must never become a business problem for B&Q’.

To that end, it joined the buyers’ group in 1991, established a database of sources by 1993 and, by 1995, could boast that all its sources were well managed. Today, 70% of its relevant stock is FSC certified, 20% is certified to the Finnish national standard and 10% is ‘work in progress’.

21st century problems of ethical trading, climate change, packaging and products waste, toxic chemicals in products, diversity and equal opportunity, product life cycles and so on, were all issues being addressed by buyers’ groups. ‘The buyers’ group has now gone beyond forestry,’ said Dr Knight. ‘So we should be proud of putting this idea into common perception.’

He identified some risks, including: good suppliers being turned down because they don’t have certification; the debate is ‘too much about forests and not about products’; and too many schemes and variation in confidence.

Dr Knight’s vision for the next 10 years is: that certification becomes a mainstream and standard specification in home improvement, retail and government procurement; that uncertified timber be bought only from forests committed to improvement; that wood becomes the material of choice for sustainability; and that the sustainability of wood will be a major competitive threat to other materials.

Wood, he concluded, should be ‘the material of choice for sustainability’.