In my January 8 blogpost, I called attention to the ambitious and impressive effort that the SFI program staff a making to engage stakeholders in the comprehensive review of their standards this year.  I feel strongly that all companies who hold SFI certificates - whether they are for Forest Management, Fiber Procurement, or Chain of Custody - should take some time to engage in this process and share their perspectives.  This, of course, includes offering frank and constructive criticism. One...

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative program just released discussion drafts of the 5-year update to its main standard documents.  They have also done an impressive job of organizing a format for stakeholder feedback and review.  I hope everyone in the business gets involved. I have only had time to give the standard drafts a single, brief overview.  I plan to go back to them over the coming weeks, organize my thoughts, and share them here.  I also intend to...

The Sustainable Forestry Initiative Program is currently engaged on a very important update to its entire set of standards.  The process began earlier this year, was kicked into  high gear yesterday with the release of the first discussion drafts for the 2015-19 standard, followed by a series of workshops and listening sessions held at a locations all over the US and Canada. The folks at SFI, Inc. deserve a lot of credit for their extraordinary efforts to ensure transparency and open discuss...

Earlier this year, I wrote about changes to the PEFC Chain of Custody standard - driven largely by new wood-product legality legislation that went into force in the European Union last year.  The new regulations (EUTR) really grabbed the attention of all the policy folks in Europe - especially the folks who work for PEFC and FSC.  Their response is likely to make life more complicated for the rest of us. I worked on two projects last month which allowed me to get "down and dirty" with the new...

The US Lacey Act might be the most important and least understood subject in the paper and forest product industry.  One reason for it being poorly understood was - until recently - that the available information and guidance about it was hard to find and rather poorly presented.  Fortunately for  all of us, that changed last month. The Dovetail Partners, a fine environmental policy group based in Minneapolis, published a white paper on the Lacey Act that everyone in the wood product supply,...

The FSC business community in the United Kingdom continue to take a strong interest (and exception) to the proposed FSC Online Claims Platform (OCP).  I was sent a copy of recent edition of the Timber Trades Journal (TTJ) online edition late last week that seems to suggest that FSC may be delaying or deferring their planned rollout in response to the negative feedback. Here are some interesting excerpts from the article: The Forest Stewardship Council has postponed a decision on making it...