Product Certification

Customers worldwide are taking a greater interest in understanding the origin of the forest products they purchase.

All Canfor Southern Pine facilities have achieved certification to SFI’s 2015-2019 Standard. To achieve this, three mills – Thomasville and Moultrie, GA, and Hermanville, MS – were certified in June so they could be included with facilities that were already certified in our multi-site certificate. The audit for the three mills identified two minor non-conformances related to written agreements for best management practices and the use of qualified logging professionals.

In Canada, Canfor and Canfor Pulp carry chain-of-custody certification on our facilities so customers can be confident they are buying products from well-managed forests. Chain-of-custody certification requires tracking of forest products through all stages of production to the consumer. Our WynnWood mill in British Columbia is certified to SFI chain of custody and fibre sourcing.

Canfor’s Forest Stewardship Council chain-of-custody certification includes a multi-site chain of custody and controlled wood certificate and a forest management and chain of custody certificate for our mills in British Columbia’s East Kootenay region. The rest of our Canadian facilities are chain-of-custody certified to the  Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC).

Independent third-party PEFC and FSC risk assessment was conducted in 2017 for our British Columbia and Alberta operations, and found there was low risk of wood harvested illegally, in violation of traditional and civil rights, from forests where high conservation values are threatened by management activities, from areas being converted from forests or from forests, in which genetically modified trees have been planted.

All of the fibre used by Canfor Pulp’s pulp and paper originates within British Columbia, and all the forest operations we source from are in full legal compliance with provincial forest laws. In 2017, 87% of this fibre supply was certified to the CSA, SFI or FSC standard.

All Canfor Pulp fibre sources have been subject to a chain-of-custody audit to both PEFC and FSC standards, and all of the products we make are eligible to be treated as FSC-controlled wood if the customer purchasing them has FSC chain-of-custody certification. Sawmill residuals, which we treat as basic raw materials, are covered by our chain of custody. Both FSC and PEFC require that we have in place audited risk assessments on all the locations where we source our fibre. These are publicly available through the FSC website’s public certificate search function.