Don't Buy SFI: Sustainable Forest Certification Gone Bad

It takes a lot of time to be a responsible consumer. Time that many of us, if you’re like me, just don’t have. That's why independent certification bodies exist to make socially-conscious shopping easier.

Groups that put a seal of approval on products telling us that our coffee is fair trade, our cosmetics aren’t toxic, our milk is really organic or that our paper has been sourced sustainably are supposed to do the work for us, to distinguish the green from the bad.

But what happens if one of them is lying?

Turns out, that’s exactly the case with paper and wood products certifier the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. According to a new report by ForestEthics, the industry sponsored group has been putting their seal of approval on furniture and paper that's made from destroyed rainforest.

The report reveals that SFI is little more than a logging industry front group, with board members drawn from some of the world’s largest loggers and close financial ties to industry. It also casts doubt on the strength of the group’s audits—the only means that SFI has to ensure that its stamp of approval is backed up by reality.

According to a blog post by ForestEthics executive director Todd Paglia on Huffington Post,

SFI's audits are actually so friendly to forest destruction that in a survey of 543 audits since 2004 only eight found any significant problems—and of these, seven were approved within a year. In other words, the chance of being denied the SFI eco-label, if a company's logging practices are even audited, is .0018%.

So what exactly is SFI certifying? Apparently, the group has no problem putting it’s seal on logging projects that encourage massive landslides and species extinction or those that involve clear-cutting and the massive use of toxic chemicals. The average clearcut approved by SFI equals the size of 90 football fields. Worse, SFI provides no restrictions on the destruction of endangered or irreplaceable old growth forests, like those found in California's Sierras. Not exactly good for the forests, as SFI’s label promises.

None of this, however, has stopped SFI from touring green building conferences touting its label, or even seeking to be included in the nation’s LEED standards for green building.

You can tell SFI that you don’t appreciate being fooled, using ForestEthics petition.

But just in case you don’t want to wait for them to clean up their act before you buy this year’s holiday cards, there are other options. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is a well-regarded certifier of wood products that's far more reliable than SFI. And of course, 100 percent post-consumer recycled is always 100 percent guilt free.

Photo credit: David Owen via Flickr

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