Revisions of FSC Chain of Custody standard finally complete

5 January 2017

On the 30^th of December FSC International announced that the revisions of their Chain of Custody standard were finally complete and that the new revised standard would be live from 1^st April 2017, with companies having to be audited and compliant with it by 31^st March 2018.

This revision process has lasted several years and included many rounds of consultation; Confor has been vocal in ensuring that the opinions of UK forestry and timber companies have been heard and understood in Bonn. The main reason for the lengthy delays has been various attempts to squeeze the “Online Claims Platform” into earlier versions of the standard. This overly bureaucratic system would have added significantly to administrations costs but delivered little in terms of the additional assurance so desired by FSC.

Confor will look at the standard in more detail over the next few days and our thoughts will be published in the next FTN.

The two main changes are:

New transaction verification requirements instead of OCP: Companies will be required to work with their Certifciaiton Bodies “by providing samples of FSC transaction data”. It is unclear what FSC mean by “transaction data” and apparently FSC will communicate additional information in the first quarter of 2017.

Cross site sharing of percentage and credit systems: FSC will monitor the implementation of these requirements and re-evaluate them after two year

Whilst the latter has some advantages and will reduce the need to truck timber between mill sites, to keep above the crucial 70%; it could also remove local price and market advantage for certified timber. Confor is already in discussion with FSC UK and FSC International on how this will issue.

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Revisions of FSC Chain of Custody standard finally complete