Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Does FSC certification help the earth?

A paper executive made an interesting admission recently to Dead Tree Edition regarding Forest Stewardship Council certification, which many environmental groups view as the gold standard for sustainable forestry.

The executive was describing an effort to get blanket FSC certification for many small forestry operations in Maine rather than having each go through a separate and expensive audit process. Sustainable forestry is common practice in Maine, but small family-run operations have found that the FSC process is stacked in favor of the big guys.

"How would these small operations have to change their forestry practices to get FSC certification?" DTE asked.

"Not at all. They're already doing it, " the executive answered.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Most likely they will have to implement changes. There is a team of independent experts that evaluate forest management practices and then judge compliance. This quote just sounds like corporate America: "trust us"