Timber and Timber Products
Timber Certification
Timber purchased by value
FSC®: Forest Stewardship Council
OCS: Other certified schemes
Approximately 20% of our revenue comes from buying and selling timber and timber products. We recognise that it’s responsible for us to only buy certified material. While we are working towards that ambition, we need to ensure that none of the product we buy has any component from illegal or uncontrolled sources.
We estimate the Group purchased 85% by value of timber and timber-fibre products in 2011 from supply chains that started in certified well managed or controlled forests. Buying for Merchants and Specialist Merchant resale was at 91%.
In 2011, we made good progress with our range of doors in both retail and merchanting. Door ranges now have significantly more certified options than uncertified options. In 2012 our range of flooring will be significantly improved so that it will consist of material predominantly sourced from certified well managed or controlled forests. As a result of these two initiatives, we expect to increase our proportion of certified purchases in 2012.
Our target for 2012 is to ensure that all of the timber products we place on the EU market for the first time are credibly certified. By 2014, we expect all our timber and timber-fibre product purchases to be from supply chains that started in certified well managed or controlled forests.
Partners
We are open to working with all organisations that can provide intelligence to inform our purchasing decisions. We have been a member of the WWF Global Forest and Trade Network since 2003. Part of our membership commitment is to publish how we are doing against their responsibility categories. Download this disclosure.
Other Products
We recognise that there are environmental impacts associated with the supply of all of the products we resell. Our immediate priority here is to establish what our intervention might be the supply chain of in our 2nd and 3rd biggest material categories to deliver an improvement.
We estimate that 40% of our supply chain is already operating with ISO14001 certified environmental management control and we have requested that all our general merchant, specialist merchant and retail suppliers adopt this standard. We will make a similar request of plumbing and heating suppliers in 2012.
Over 2011 we have worked with a couple of partners to trial a measure of the environmental impact of a product that is simple enough to be repeated at scale and yet meaningful, and therefore, useful to our suppliers, our customers and ourselves. We have adopted two approaches, one broad brush, which aggregates all environmental factors into a single score, the other, a narrower focus on ‘cradle to factory gate’ carbon dioxide emissions. We intend to continue developing these measures during 2012 before releasing them for suppliers to adopt.
Resource Efficiency
Taking virgin material out of a product without reducing its performance is a great way of acting responsibly. This is already going on across our supply chain and in 2012, we will be trying to understand the best way of accelerating and recording progress.
In 2011, we introduced a number of products with a higher recycled content, such as Ecosand made from recycled glass. Check the SBS website for more examples. We also identified and acted on opportunities that should remove 600 tonnes of packaging during the full calendar year of 2012.
Partners
We continue to work with WRAP on home improvement product resource efficiency.
