FSC Certification
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) represents the best known certifying society in charge of wood industry that issues FSC certificates to companies and plantations administrators. This certification is an expensive process and only very little of the fees to be paid for certification, remain the in developing countries; thus, small producers cannot afford obtaining such a certificate due to financial reasons. The pressure imposed by bigger clients asking for certification results in a concentration of the industry, with a surely negative effect for the level of occupation in Indonesian furniture industry, due to the fact that large plants operate more and more rationally compared to the small manufacturers which are mainly man-power based.
According to what we know, at the moment no Indonesian plantation operator holds a certification and, due to this reason, consequently the manufacturing complexes cannot be certified, as there is a “hole” in wood purchasing that makes certification impossible.
Beside FSC certificate there are other certificates, too, however, according to what we know, they do not have the same importance and the same capacity of independence. The world wide consumers must be careful as some certificates are worth even less than the paper they are printed on. Most of time their role is to gratify their conscience, i.e. the role of marketing instrument and in many cases checks are not made because there are local interests for the “laundry” of ecologic products.
We can ensure our clients, even without a FSC certificate, that the teak wood we use comes exclusively from the state controlled plantations, namely from PERHUTANI authorised traders. Such a certificate is issued for each acquisition of wood. At your request, we can show you the original documents. At the same time we collaborate with the organisations for environment protection so that to update our knowledge and to be informed with respect to the newest evolutions.
On the whole our opinion is that the importance of this certificate is over estimated; most of the times certification is made either on political grounds or due to other causal reasons (company image for instance). In the final analysis, companies and consumers must define certain principles of action that they should comply with consistently, even though once or several times disadvantages emerge, for example higher prices due to environmentally correct behaviour. The best supervising process may be compromised as each certificate may be forged.
If you have any more questions or initiatives, please contact us and we will provide more details. |
