Today I happened to stumble on a rather nice piece of writing about FSC and SFI certification from the perspective of a commercial printer.  I have no connection to these folks, but was impressed with their site. Please take a look: http://www.bassettecompany.com/environmental-insights/close-critical-look-at-fsc-sfi/

Last August I wrote a blogpost entitled FSC and the ILO.  It attempted to summarize and call some attention to a very strange, but important conflict that has arisen between FSC-IC and a group of (mostly) US companies over some apparently minor details of language in FSC documents. The issue boils down to this: The latest version of the FSC Chain of Custody standard requires all FSC-certified companies to sign a self-declaration statement (Annex B of PRO-20-001). The self-declaration document...

For quite a few years, a large Indonesian pulp and paper conglomerate called Sinar Mas has been everyone's favorite whipping boy in the ENGO community.  Sinar Mas does business under its more well-know subsidiary name of Asia Pulp and Paper (APP).  From my perspective, it has always been a bit hard to tell whether they were, in fact, an evil personification of all short sighted resource exploitation; or rather just a typical corporation trying to do business in a challenging corner of the...

A colleague who follows this blog sent me the following short piece.  I found it to be a thoughtful and interesting observation.  I have the feeling that this line of thought is not welcomed within the FSC staff group lately.  It should be. The real challenge is always to find a good balance between credibility and practicability for mainstream markets. If you ask lots of information, you might end up with a very credible system – but the high workload for the companies also means that no one...

January 21 was a travel day for me - on my way to Toronto for three days of technical training with colleagues.  I saw and heard snippets of the media coverage of the festivities in Washington along the way. One point of interest to me, and perhaps a small handful of the national audience, was the fact that President Obama took his oath and made his speech from a temporary platform constructed of lumber from an SFI-certified company.  The folks at SFI, Inc. had done some promotion of this, of...

I have received quite a bit of feedback and correspondence from my 10 Jan blogpost.  Please keep the conversation going. Probably the most interesting comments were received from two unrelated colleagues who both compared the new FSC OCP platform to the supply chain management system operated by Walmart.  The comparison is a bit of a stretch, but the analogy is though-provoking.  The massive, top-down, conform-or-else, style that Walmart brings to the retail supply chain certainly is effective...