When FSC Canada released the discussion draft of their National Risk Assessment early last month, we were eager to look at the details and begin considering the impact it may have on the business of certified wood products here in North America.  While the MixedWood blog is written from a clearly American point of view, we maintain a keen interest in our neighbors to the north.   The release of FSC’s official Risk Assessments for North America (US and Canada) have long promised to have...

The writing in this space continues to be dominated by the long, painful process of re-inventing the FSC's Controlled Wood program.  The long, painful story continues and remains critical to the success of the entire certified wood marketplace.  So we continue to follow it closely. Our recent writing has focused on the release of a discussion draft by FSC-US - intended to be the last public look at their important National Risk Assessment (NRA) which is likely to be finalized sometime later...

The US affiliate of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC-US) recently released a discussion draft of a very important National Risk Assessment (US-NRA).  We consider this a very important document – the result of over 5 years of work – and likely to have a significant influence on certified wood markets throughout North America and indeed the world. As is their practice, FSC-US has posted the US-NRA publicly and is inviting comment from all interested stakeholders.  This should include everyone...

Our last post - published just yesterday - included several links to the FSC Document Center which readers may have found confusing.  We discovered, after posting, that the version of the Controlled Wood Interpretations Document available in the Document Center was not the most current version and (importantly) did not include the specific Interpretation that we were discussing and criticizing . The post has since been corrected and updated (click here to read). Thanks, as always, for your...

In our last post, we were pleased and excited to finally begin discussing the long-awaited details of the Forest Stewardship Council’s National Risk Assessment for the USA.  The US-NRA is quite possibly the most significant new policy document produced by FSC’s US affiliate in years.  It is important, still in need of work, and worth giving our attention to. We hoped to continue and add to our writing about the US-NRA this week, but we find that we cannot.  We will return to that subject soon....

The US affiliate of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC-US) released the latest version of its Controlled Wood National Risk Assessment (NRA) for the United States just before the Christmas holidays, we wasted no time in calling attention to it with our brief posting on December 16.  This document is very important to the whole FSC program, for reasons that we have discussed at length before, and surely will again.  As is typical with FSC, the NRA document had been in the works for a very long...