Watch out, there’s a journo about! If you get mysterious customers poking around your yard, showroom or retail outlet and quizzing you about whether your timber and wood products are certified, they may well turn out to be national newspaper reporters. The next thing you know, even if you think you’re greener than green, you could find yourself hung out to dry as an eco-pariah in the next edition.
This was the experience last week of retail giant IKEA, a company which sets great store by and makes a major marketing feature of its environmental performance.
Journalists from The Times visited two of the company’s outlets, in London and Southampton, and asked staff whether various products used certified timber. Whether through lack of judgement or knowledge, the unfortunate IKEA employees said that 100% of all the wood it used was FSC certified.
The subsequent report in the paper made a great play of the fact that, in reality, ‘just’ 16% of the company’s timber supplies are FSC. Not only was that 84% short of the employees’ claims, it was well below the 30% target Ikea had set itself for 2009.
The first lesson from IKEA’s experience is obviously that timber and timber-using companies, and their employees, all need to ensure they get their environmental stories right. Thanks to popular and particularly media misconceptions about wood and forest products generally (and just this week advocates of peers using iPads in the House of Lords said they’d be “saving trees” by not using paper), it’s hard enough to persuade people that the industry’s sole objective is not deforestation. Having staff found out claiming (albeit by accident) that your eco-performance is better than it is, is pure publicity poison.
But another lesson from the whole episode is that, when it comes to judging the environmental record of the forestry and timber industries, the UK media need to be educated that FSC certification is not the absolute be all and end all.
IKEA’s global forestry manager Anders Hildeman did stress to TTJ that its 16% of FSC-certified timber actually comprised 23.6% of its solid wood consumption and 10% of its panel products – and it uses over 5 million m³ of solid wood a year alone. He highlighted too that IKEA is on target to hit 35% of certified solid wood next year and that its panel products certification drive is actually still in its infancy, has hit the 10% figure very rapidly and will announce new higher targets soon.
But he also mentioned the effort and resources IKEA puts into ensuring firstly that its timber is legally sourced. It is also actively helping producers worldwide improve forest management generally, albeit with the ultimate aim of certification. Very little of such basic, but fundamental, invaluable and costly work being undertaken across the global timber industry ever gets any press coverage.
Nor do certification schemes other than the FSC’s get their publicity dues. The exclusive FSC focus of The Times piece was inevitable as it is IKEA’s certification scheme of choice, but the reporter still felt a compunction to say it was pretty much the only one worth having. Let the press know first of all that the others, the PEFC, SFI, CSA and MTCS, exist and convince them, as the government’s Central Point of Expertise on Timber has been convinced, that they are valid proof of timber legality and sustainability, and it will further dispel the preconception that this industry is a prime and vulnerable target for negative environmental coverage.
