Wednesday, 11 May 2016
Additional Evaluation of FSC Chain of Custody Certification Standard
© Sebastian Hillig via Compfight cc
May 11, 2016
The FSC International Board of Directors has decided to postpone the publication of the FSC-STD-40-004 Chain of Custody Certification standard for six months to ensure the effects of its proposed changes are fully assessed before implementation.
“The relevance and effectiveness of our chain of custody (CoC) system is paramount to the integrity of FSC. Our stakeholders have urged us to consider a number of proposals to the standard that would make sourcing FSC material easier. But, the implications of these have to be considered thoroughly to ensure that our certificate holders can institute requirements easily, and in a way that maintains the credibility of the supply chain,” commented FSC Director General Kim Carstensen.
To allow for further research and stakeholder consultation into key areas, such as transaction verification criteria, and cross-site credit and cross-site percentage systems, a 60-day public consultation will be launched at the end of May 2016. It is expected the revised standard will be presented to the FSC International Board of Directors in November 2016 for approval.
For more information on this revision process, please see the FSC CoC consultation page.