Many thanks to Harry Morrison at The Carbon Trust Standard Company for correcting the information from the Institute of Directors featured in “Climate of change”. Taking up the Carbon Trust Standard, or putting products through the carbon labelling mechanism represented by PAS2050, is certainly one approach to tackling carbon footprints. In economically challenging times, an immediate cost- and CO²-reducing step for the timber trade would be to tackle the one area which challenges the industry’s claim to provide a ‘sustainable’ product: namely, the widespread transport of timber and wood products inside the UK.
Are the delivery patterns currently requested by the industry’s customers truly ‘sustainable’? And if not, how can we work together, from forest to end user, to improve both cost and CO² outcomes? Individual companies such as our own are already making a start. Reviewing the transport arrangements for just one section of SCA Timber Supply’s UK operations should confirm a reduction of around 700 tonnes of CO² in 2008, though we fully recognise that we are only at the beginning of the transport reduction journey that we must make.
A collective start to tackling transport emissions could perhaps be made as part of the Norton House process, currently being led by the TTF. One thing is for certain: timber transport reduction needs to be pursued by the trade with the same vigour that it has devoted to timber certification and responsible purchasing over the past 10 years, if we are not to lose out to competing construction materials.
Camilla Hair
Public relations
SCA Timber Supply Ltd
