What is sustainable wood.
We all know that trees are a great carbon sponge (although Peatland is much better) and they also make a great material to paper and cardboard from, but felling trees, and not replacing them is irresponsible and bad for the planet and with this in mind, all of our paper and cardboard products are made using wood from one of the two main certification bodies.
So why does this matter ?
Illegal logging actually contributes 17% of all man made emissions, so it's not a small scale problem, to put this into further focus, the planet is now down to only 10% of primary forests remain.
It's a huge issue in countries like Malaysia that are now down to 10% of their forest cover and this is all down to the sale of permits without controls, it's such a huge problem that the Malaysian anti corruption unit is investigating key Government officals involved in issuing permits, but this isn't a Malysian issue as the same people have been implicated in the illegal logging in China, Lao, Thalland and Vietnam.
So this illegal loggin can only be stamped out if key markets and companies like oursleves only source certified paper or wood.
It's worth remembering that trees are the second most important carbon sequesters (the removal of carbon from the environment) with the first most important being peatlands ( everyone forgets about this one) but thankfully keys areas of Peatland like the UK have banned peat from horticulture (not before time).
How does certification eliminate this?
The environmental and ethical destruction caused by illegal logging can only be solved by companies like ourselves using sustainable but also certifed paper or wood sources, put simply if people don't buy illegally sourced wood , then the people involved in it's trade would have no market.
This is why we only use certified wood products in our packaging, we just don't compromise.
So what are the benefits of using sustainably sourced certified wood?
The benefits are
- Long term preservation of forests as the forest owners are taught about applying best practise to preserve the natural environment within their forests.
- The two main certicication bodies demand and encourage ethical and responsible relationships with the community that leads to employment and empowerment of the workers.
- Membership encourages forest owners who aren't felling trees responsibly to change their approach, to obtain access to the the large western market that insists on certification, basically if they can't encourage landowners to do the right thing, they can financially encourage land owners to do the right thing.
So what's in it for responsible forest owners member?
It's a challenging process to get their wood stocks certified, it's based on not only saying they are doing the right thing, but proving they are abiding by the environmental and ethical principles that membership of either of the two main bodies certifies, plus it shows commitment to sustainable forestry as it comes with a high price tag.
Once they have gone through the process and recieved the certification, they are annually audited to make certain they abide by the standards of ethical and sustainable forestry that they agreed to at the start of the process.
So is The Pure Option a member?
The Pure Option™ is not a member as our product material manufacturers hold the certificates, so basically it's a bit overkill, we make certain that our products are made using one of the two certification bodies, because we know this gives us a guarnatee that the trees are harvested legally and sustainably.
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