CSR Insights: The Current State of Forest Certification

If you make it a habit to stay informed about CSR certifications, you are no doubt familiar with Forest Stewardship Certification (FSC) and the Sustainable Forest Initiative (SFI), the two credentials available in the U.S.  FSC and SFI logos now make frequent appearances on your junk mail, and have to some extent have become household names.

Clearly, there is no major barrier to purchasing paper from sustainably-harvested sources, but as I learned during a conversation at the Ceres conference, this is not the case for all categories of timber-based products.  Specifically, in speaking with a representative from a major U.S.-based utility company, sustainable wood alternatives are simply not available for some types of products his company sources.  To illustrate, while he had been pleased to identify a supplier that could offer him FSC-certified crossarms (the horizontal wooden beams at the top of utility poles) at competitive prices, he has so far been unable to find green alternatives for the utility poles themselves.  In fact, at 70 to 90 feet tall, utility poles can only be made from very specific types of trees, with only two to three forests in the U.S. sourcing trees tall and straight enough to meet product standards.

Was my new friend missing something?  Visiting the SFI and FSC databases provided only limited answers.  A quick search of the SFI database did not prove helpful and a keyword-search within the FSC database for poles revealed at least one U.S.-sourced telephone pole supplier and at least one source for flagpoles with the FSC label.  I'll have to ask whether telephone pole and utility pole standards differ.

But while the quest for a sustainably-sourced utility pole presents an engaging challenge, this episode gave me perspective on some larger CSR problems.  A discussion with Kerry Cesareo, Acting Managing Director of Forests at WWF-US, helped me understand that many U.S. forests are managed by smaller forest companies, and that many smaller forest companies decide not to pursue FSC certification because they find the costs, technical issues, and lack of immediate payoff too daunting.  A number of programs have been developed to address this problem, and in fact, this is one reason why WWF is using its Global Forest and Trade Network (GFTN) to recognize companies actively engaged in stepwise programs to become FSC-certified within a designated time horizon.

So what advice did Ms. Cesareo have to offer CSR practitioners and procurement professionals seeking FSC-certified utility poles and other more esoteric items?  Beyond scouring the FSC product database and checking with suppliers to actively confirm that they are not in a position to provide FSC-certified alternatives, she recommended consulting the Forest Certification Resource Center's Metafore database as well as GFTN's resources to look for sources that might have been overlooked.  She also mentioned SmartSource, the Rainforest Alliance's service for companies interested in improving their purchasing policies.

If nothing else, this chapter has served as a reminder that in the grand scheme of things, the burgeoning CSR field is still in a nascent stage.  But while resources available to CSR practitioners are not quite user-friendly at this point in time, we are well on our way to a suite of resources to help my friend from the utility company find the products he is seeking.

Photo credit: Bulliver