Among the “hot topics” under discussion this week at the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) 2017 General Assembly is Controlled Wood.  This subject has been controversial from the moment the idea was introduced over 10 years ago.  Readers of the MixedWood blog know that it has been a regular and productive topic for us as well.  For anyone who needs a review, please click here for our summary from last November. We called the situation “A Sorry Mess” in November.  And is some ways things are...

As we mentioned in our last post (just this morning), MixedWood is attending and participating in the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) 2017 General Assembly, underway this week in the beautiful city of Vancouver, British Columbia.  Today was the opening session of the 6-day meeting, and we were impressed to see a crowd already gathered when registration opened this morning.  Over 750 people are registered and more expected to join us later in the week.  The participants are a remarkably...

Regular readers of this blog may have wondered where we have been for the last several months.  The answer, of course, is complicated.  But one good excuse has been a very busy season for FSC Controlled Wood consulting.  If you are among the folks still struggling with this process, please click here to see our last post on the subject. We hope to make up for lost time during the coming week.  MixedWood is attending the FSC General Assembly (GA) this week.  The "GA", as it is known, is FSC's...

Today’s subject – once again – is the FSC Controlled Wood system. A major transition is underway in the community of FSC-certified companies. The long-awaited transition from FSC-STD-40-005 version 2-1 (in place and largely unchanged since 2007) to version 3-1 is fully underway everywhere. Certification Bodies (CB’s) are actively updating their protocols and training their auditors. Certified companies are coming to grips with the decision to either adapt and accept the new standard or drop...

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) published a long-awaited update to the important Chain of Custody standard earlier this winter. If you are a regular reader of this blog, and you have not yet looked at version 3-0 of the FSC Chain of Custody standard, we recommend that you do. Follow this link to the publication announcement that was posted on 1 February. You can download the final document here, as well as an interesting “crosswalk” document which compares versions 2-1 and 3-0. The...

The long, long process of updating the Forest Stewardship Council’s (FSC’s) important Chain of Custody (CoC) standard may finally be nearing an end. We learned, along with others at the regional meeting last week in New York City, that the Board of Directors has approved  a final version of FSC-STD-40-004 v.3-0.  Earlier this week, the staff posted a short Decision Record giving hints about what is coming. Here is a summary of the interesting points (click above for the whole document): The...