SCA receives FSC certificate - offers labelled timber products

SCA receives FSC certificate - offers labelled timber products In mid January SCA received the certificate that demonstrates that the company's two million hectares of forest land are managed according to the priniples and criteria established by FSC, Forest Stewardship Council. FSC demands forest management with great consideration for nature conservation, the sami population and local communities. - We are very pleased. The certificate confirms the high standard of our forest management, says Jerker Karlsson, President SCA Forest and Timber, the part of the SCA Group that manages its forest holdings and supplies its Swedish forest industries with wood raw material. - We will have the opportunity to offer our customers FSC-labelled sawn timber and we are now investigating the demand and price for labelled timber products. If the demand is there and the price is reasonable, we will definitely produce FSC-labelled products to the extent our customers want. FSC is an international organisation, with forest companies and environmental organisations among its members. The purpose of the organisation is to stimulate the development of responsible forest management. FSC has developed general principles, which have been translated into concrete criteria for a country or region. In Sweden a working group, where forest companies, environmental organisations, the sami population and trade unions have been represented, has developed a Swedish FSC standard. A number of certifiers have been accredited by FSC to conduct the audits, where the observance of the standard is checked and to issue certificates. - The Swedish FSC standard conforms well to our own nature conservation strategies, applied over several years, says Per Simonsson, forest ecologist at SCA Forest and Timber. We have not made any significant changes in our forest management to fulfil the criteria. We have had to develop our routines and our monitoring systems, however, in order to give evidence of that we manage our forests as well everywhere and all the time. - We have already introduced the environmental management system ISO 14001 and for a large forest owner, such as SCA, a system of this kind is inevitable in order to guarantee fulfilment of our own policies as well as the FSC standard. SGS Forestry is the certifier that has carried out the audit of SCAs forest management. During September and October, the auditors from SGS checked the quality of SCAs forest management, through documents but also field studies and interviews with environmental organisations and other interested parties. The audit was followed by a peer review, which identified roughly ten minor deviations from the standard, which will be corrected by SCA during the coming months. Finally the material was put before SGS' Certifying Board in Oxford, Great Britain, which issued the FSC certificate. Products produced from FSC certified raw material, may be labelled with the FSC logo only if the timber is traced back to the forest through the chain custody - forest -sawmill-customer. This chain of custody must be documented and certified as well. Stockholm, 21 January 1999 SVENSKA CELLULOSA AKTIEBOLAGET SCA Corporate Communications For further information, please contact Jerker Karlsson, President SCA Forest and Timber, tel +46 60 19 33 48 Per Simonsson, Forest Ecologist, tel +46 60 19 32 28 Mårten Larsson, Manager Technical Development and TQM, tel +46 60 19 33 81 Björn Lyngfelt, Communications Manager, tel +46 60 19 34 98 SVENSKA CELLULOSA AKTIEBOLAGET SCA (publ) Corporate Communications Box 7827, SE-103 97 STOCKHOLM, Sweden Tel +46 8-788 51 00, Fax +46 8-678 81 30 www.sca.se ------------------------------------------------------------ Please visit http://www.bit.se for further information The following files are available for download: http://www.bit.se/bitonline/1999/01/21/19990121BIT00280/bit0001.doc http://www.bit.se/bitonline/1999/01/21/19990121BIT00280/bit0002.pdf