The Nuisance:

In theory, the trademarks of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and of the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes (PEFC) are official seals for raw wood and wood products. They should guarantee to the buyer that woods marked this way come from forests managed in an exemplary manner.

In practice, this is certainly not the case!

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Over and over again, contraventions are committed against the FSC and PEFC rules and these have become known. Nonetheless, no effective controls are implemented to prevent clear-cutting and destruction of old-growth forests or to sanction the shortfall of social standards and the corruption. No difference can be recognized on FSC- and PEFC-certified areas compared to „conventional“ silviculture. Besides this, due to inadequate control mechanisms it is possible to falsify, re-declare certificates and to continue to utilize withdrawn certificates without restrictions. This way, wood from destructive exploitation from Brazil, re-declared softwood from Canada and Siberia or blood-stained wood (teak) from Myanmar get to the market regularly with FSC or PEFC seals.

Our Claim:

Therefore, instead of the FSC and PEFC seal, we have requested for quite some time now, a full declaration about the wood, in order to make the production chain more transparent. 

The following should be marked:

1. the botanical name of the wood

2. the trade name

3. the country of origin

4. the climatic region (boreal, temperate, subtropical and tropical)

5. the forest formation (old-growth forest, forest, monocultures/plantations)

Only such marking puts users and traders again in the position to get their own imagination and to decide on their own which wood to buy.

Against Greenwashing-Zertifikate from FSC & Co: download (182.32 kB)