Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Virtually all ‘green’ claims made by British timber traders and DIY
superstores about their tropical timbers are misleading and unsubstantiated,
according to an unpublished survey of more than 600 companies completed
last year by the World Wide Fund for Nature.

The report’s author, Mike Read, said this week: ‘Outrageous claims are
being made that the timber trade does not damage rainforests. But there
is no evidence to back them up.’

Read’s report has been kept under wraps by the WWF as it negotiates
with the timber trade to persuade it to take tropical timber only from genuinely
sustainable sources – in return for a seal of approval from environmentalists.

His report, Truth or Trickery, concludes that ‘of the many thousands
of retailers of tropical timber in the UK . . . probably as many as one
half are prepared to reassure their customers as to the environmental acceptability
of their sources . . . At most, only 1 or 2 per cent of companies making
claims of sustainability are able to justify their assertion.’

His survey found that chain stores such as W. H. Smith’s Do It All displayed
timber carrying ‘Save the Rainforest’ stickers. Do It All also sold doors
labelled ‘This product is manufactured from a sustainable timber’, and stairway
parts made from Brazilian mahogany harvested under a policy that was ‘welcomed
by Friends of the Earth’.

The supplier of the mahogany, Richard Burbidge, has recently agreed
to remove this endorsement following complaints from Friends of the Earth
which ‘went on for almost three years’, according to rainforest campaigner
Simon Counsell. He said this week: ‘Burbidge did take the trouble to check
that his timber source was authorised by the Brazilian government, but that
does not mean it was sustainable and we never agreed to his using our name.’

Another chain store, B&Q, sold floor blocks which claimed that ‘the
wood used in this product has been obtained only from sources where the
government has a policy of reafforestation’, as well as ‘environment friendly’
mahogany toilet seats. Texas Homecare sold solid timber doors advertised
as made with Malaysian timber harvested ‘in accordance with the principles
of sustained yield management, thus safeguarding the ecological balance’.

Such claims, if taken at face value, says Read, range from the meaningless
to the mendacious. Read criticised publicity from the Timber Trade Federation
for providing ‘a mixture of fact, wishful thinking and gross inaccuracy’.

The Timber Trade Federation, through its campaign Forests Forever, is
helping to fund a science conference on sustainable forestry at the Oxford
Forestry Institute this week. It has also been in extensive negotiations
with the WWF to establish a code of conduct for the trade, aimed at ensuring
that tropical timber comes only from ‘sustainable’ sources by 1995.

Britain is the largest importer of tropical timber in the European Community
with almost 2 million cubic metres arriving at British ports each year.
In the WWF’s survey, half of the timber traders who res-ponded made some
kind of green claim for their products. Many, such as Do It All, claimed
that their timber came from ‘sustainable sources’ or, like Texas Homecare,
that they had ‘sustainably managed sources’ or, like Sainsbury’s Homebase,
that logged areas were ‘to be reforested’.

Read does not believe many of these claims. A widely quoted study by
the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development
concluded that less than 1 per cent of commercial tropical forestry could
be called sustainable, involving no loss of wildlife habitat or biodiversity.
And, says Read, ‘as yet, indications of replanting are pitifully inadequate
as reassurance that all iswell and sustainable’. Plantations that replace
natural forests ‘are often of very little value to wildlifeor indigenous
±è±ð´Ç±è±ô±ð²õ’.

He reports that only a fifth of the companies making green claims attempted,
when pressed, to justify them. And of more than 600 companies contacted
only 3 ‘made any serious attempt to answer the questions raised’.

Read says ‘there is a desperate need for an independent agency’ to monitor
the activities of logging companies in forests and the routes from the forestfloor
to showrooms, timber yards and DIY stores. Until that is established, he
says, all green claims for tropical timber and wood products should be ‘withdrawn
forthwith by all companies except where specific and detailed information
can be produced to support the claim’.

But this week, major stores that have signed up to the WWF initiative,
were still advertising the green credentials of their timber. Texas Homecare
in Wandsworth, South London, for instance, still displayed Burbidge’s Friends
of the Earth endorsement for his Amazon mahogany, along with ‘environmentally
managed’ Malaysian hardwood and other green-labelledtropical timbers.

Last week, one signatory to the WWF ‘1995 list’, Don Dennis, director
of Milland Fine Timber in Hampshire, withdrew his company from the scheme
because, he said the list had become ‘a PR exercise for the trade’. He accused
the WWF of making compromises with large timber traders.

Meanwhile, in the US at the end of last month, a meeting of rainforest
campaigners from Europe and North America, including Britain’s WWF and Friends
of the Earth, agreed to set up a permanent body to operate an international
system of Forest Stewardship Standards, which could govern the issuing of
‘green labels’.

Bob Simeoni, a forester from Minnesota and prime mover behind the standards,
says: ‘The aim is to have a broad-based coalition of environmentalists operating
a green labelling system for wood. We have to take the initiative. Time
is short. There are a lot of industry groups trying to do the same thing
and with the resources to paint themselves any way they like.’