Forest Stewardship Council

It's called the Global Platform for Sustainable Natural Rubber out of Singapore.

And we also do a lot on natural rubber on our own in terms of, for example, FSC certification, the Forest Stewardship Council certification, which you normally find on photocopy paper and so on.

We do that for natural rubber.

So it's a chain of custody audit that happens every year from the natural rubber trees all the way through to the factory that's producing the tires.

But the next phase has been a lot of knowledge is regarding forestry.

If you look at FSC, for example, it's protect forestry, protect native forest.

That's very easy.

But we're in an area of the world where it's a lot of savanna and how to protect savanna.

But yeah, so my name is Kaylyn Glenn and I work in the forest product space and forest management.

So recently I've been working for Forest Stewardship Council and so that's a certification program.

and overseeing our Southeastern program.

So it's working closely with mills and landowners, loggers, and anyone within the forestry supply chain.

20 years ago I was working as a product developer for a well-known UK home furnishings company and we visited Indonesia several times to buy teak garden furniture.

At that time the Forest Stewardship Council or FSC was a relatively newly set up body created to ensure what was called a traceable chain of custody for tropical hardwoods, particularly teak, from plantations all the way through to the retailer.

Very similar to what the RSPO has been set up to do with palm oil.

On one visit our quality control manager and I asked to go and visit the plantations in Paromperitani up on the island of Java.

The agent looked at us with a wry smile and said it doesn't matter which day you choose the plantations won't be operating on that day due to a religious holiday.

It's this kind of insidious corruption that's just a way of life in Indonesia and many other countries around the world, often carried out with a smirk and a greasy handshake.

As recently as this year, 2018, Greenpeace has announced it will no longer be affiliated with the FSC because it can't be confident in its ability to assure the supply chain of these timbers.

So here's the big question, what's the solution? Any solution will have to be able to meet the global demand of a rising population which means it'll need all the available land in all the right climates.

And the fact that I think we've got to go bigger, because I'd like to see all of the European Union just ban the import of palm oil completely, whether it's certified or not.

Frankly, I don't think the certification strategies work worth a damn, including Forest Stewardship Council and that work, the Rainforest Action Network helped start, thanks to Pamela's work.

It was worth a try, but certification isn't really getting the job done.

In terms of going bigger and systemic change, we need to convert all industrial agriculture into ecological farming globally.

Yes, exactly.

Like when I buy a book and it has that little FSC or PEFC logo on the back, certifying it comes from sustainably managed forests.

Perfect example.

When you see a book certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, that does not mean every single microscopic wood fiber in that specific piece of paper was physically tracked from a single sustainable tree through the pulp mill and into the bindery.

But yeah, I would still try to look for certifications.

It's the best we can do, right, as consumers, if we have time, to look for an FSC, Forest Stewardship Council logo or an RSPO logo on the back of cooking oil as a proxy to at least try to do something that's a bit better for the

planet.

Yeah.

So what about things like wood and paper products? Could you first speak to the impact of logging on birds here in Canada?

So yeah, if you do want to make sure you are buying a paper or wood product that didn't, you know, harm our forest birds, you can look for the label by the Forest Stewardship Council, FSC.

It's widely regarded as, you know, as the best label out there when it comes to paper products.

And yeah, it's not just paper.