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By Root 2183 0

between producers, suppliers, manufacturers, wholesalers, and retail stores is so complex that even companies themselves rarely know where their wood ultimately comes from or goes to, except for knowing their immediate suppliers and customers. For the ultimate consumer in Miami to be able to have confidence that the board she is buying really came from a tree in a certified forest, intermediate suppliers must keep certified and non-certified material separate, and auditors must certify that every intermediate supplier is actually doing that. That constitutes “certifying the chain of custody”: tracking certified materials through the whole supply chain. The end result is that only about 17% of the products from certified forests end up bearing the FSC’s logo in a retail store; the other 83% get commingled with non-certified products along the chain. Certifying the chain of custody sounds like, and really is, a big pain in the neck. But it is an essential pain in the neck, because otherwise the consumer could not be confident of the ultimate origins of that board in the Miami store.

Do enough members of the public really care about environmental issues for FSC certification to help sell wood products? When asked in surveys, 80% of consumers claim that they would prefer to buy products of environmentally clean provenance if given the choice. But are those just empty words, or do people really pay attention to FSC labels when they are in a store? And would they be willing to pay a little more for an FSC-labeled product?

These issues are crucial to companies pondering whether to apply and pay for certification. The questions were put to the test in an experiment carried out at two Home Depot stores in Oregon. Each store set up two nearby bins containing plywood pieces of the same size, and similar except that the plywood in one bin carried the FSC label and the plywood in the other bin didn’t. The experiment was run twice: either with the plywood in the two bins costing the same, or else with the FSC-labeled plywood costing 2% more than the unlabeled plywood. It turned out that, when the cost was the same, FSC-labeled plywood outsold unlabeled plywood by more than 2 to 1. (At one of the stores in a “liberal,” environmentally aware university town, the factor was 6 to 1, but even at the store in the more “conservative” town the labeled plywood still outsold unlabeled plywood by 19%.) When the labeled plywood cost 2% more than the unlabeled plywood, of course most customers preferred the cheaper product, but nevertheless a large minority (37%) still proceeded to buy the labeled product. Thus, much of the public really does weigh environmental values in its purchasing decisions, and a significant fraction of the public is willing to pay more for those values.

When FSC certification was first introduced, there was much fear that certified products would indeed end up costing more, either because of the expense of the certification audit or of the forestry practices necessary for certification. Much subsequent experience has shown that certification usually does not add to a wood product’s inherent cost. In cases where markets did price certified products higher than comparable non-certified ones, that turned out to be due just to the laws of supply and demand rather than inherent costs: retailers selling a certified product available only in short supply, for which there was high demand, found that they could get away with raising the price.

The list of big businesses that participated in the initial formation of the FSC, joined the board of directors, or committed themselves more recently to FSC goals includes some of the world’s largest producers and sellers of timber products. Among U.S.-based companies are Home Depot, the world’s largest retailer of lumber; Lowe’s, second only to Home Depot in the U.S. home improvement industry; Columbia Forest Products, one of the largest forest product companies in the U.S.; Kinko’s (now merged with FedEx), the world’s largest provider of business services and document copying; Collins