Marketing Its Mark Is Fsc's Next Challenge - Forest Stewardship Council, labeling wood and wood products - Industry Overview

Home Channel News, August 6, 2001 by R. Michelle Breyer

The Council has also gone to "percentage-based" chain of custody, which allows for as little as 17.5 percent of the wood to be certified wood if the other 82.5 percent is "neutral content material." The higher the amount of virgin fiber in the product, the higher the percentage required to be FSC certified. A paper written by Eric Hansen of Oregon State University, which appeared in literature of the Certified Forest Products Council, noted that FSC will bestow its label on solid wood that has come from a forest that's been 70 percent certified, and on finished products whose content is 30 percent certified.

Some critics scoff at FSC's chain-of-custody policy as a flawed concept. "It's nearly impossible to do chain of custody on the large scale the industry needs to survive as an industry," Klein insisted.

Leick Furniture of Sheboygan, Wis, is launching its New Forest line this summer, a line of cherry, maple and oak furniture with 70 percent FSC certification. "To me, the biggest value is that [FSC] is independent," said Greg Leick, Leick Furniture's CEO.

While Leick has enough certified wood for its current orders, it may not be able to find enough to expand the program. And he said FSC certification process hasn't been easy (it took his company a year), and it the process includes costs that will be difficult to pass on to a consumer who doesn't know or care much about wood certification.

"I don't know how you get people to understand something as abstract as how a parcel of forest is managed," Leick said.

That's where Pierce Brosnan comes in. FSC plans to spend a lot of money on ads with more high-profile celebrities to convince people that there is value in the FSC name, Cauley said.

"Will one label predominate in the marketplace?" Cauley asked. "There's not room for more than one label in the marketplace."