How late­comer cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tems can suc­ceed in instill­ing their sys­tems in the mar­ket.
Kenji Kaneko
Nikkei Ecol­ogy edi­to­r­ial staff

On 20th Octo­ber, 2009, Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), a major paper com­pany in Indone­sia, held a LEI cer­ti­fied paper sem­i­nar in Tokyo. The LEI cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion devel­oped by LEI (Indone­sia Eco­la­bel­ing Insti­tute) to give an endorse­ment to sus­tain­able forestry man­age­ment. This is an Indone­sian ver­sion of the for­est cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem of FSC (For­est Stew­ard­ship Coun­cil) which is head­quar­tered in Ger­many. Papers made of cer­ti­fied wood mate­ri­als derived from such forests are dubbed as cer­ti­fied paper.

Envi­ron­men­tal NGOs have been crit­i­ciz­ing that wood mate­ri­als used by APP were har­vested from high con­ser­va­tion value forests. In response to such crit­i­cisms, sev­eral inter­na­tional or Japan­ese com­pa­nies ter­mi­nated to pur­chase papers from APP. In order to over­come such sus­pi­cions, APP has decided to launch LEI cer­ti­fied paper.

In the past, envi­ron­men­tally friendly papers were mostly recy­cled papers, how­ever, FSC cer­ti­fied papers are begin­ning to get recog­ni­tion due to the recy­cled paper con­tent fal­si­fi­ca­tion issue has come to the fore.

Recently, cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tems for agri­cul­ture, forestry and fish­ery have started up one after another. One of the rea­sons why cer­ti­fied prod­ucts have become wide­spread is that com­pa­nies are now required to con­serve biodiversity.

As demand for cer­ti­fied prod­ucts increases, var­i­ous cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tems have started to evolve in the same busi­ness sec­tor such as LEI cer­ti­fi­ca­tion acquired by APP and SGEC (Sus­tain­able Green Ecosys­tem Coun­cil) in Japan. While FSC and MSC were devel­oped with the back­ing of envi­ron­men­tal NGOs, most late­comer cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tems such as SGEC and MEL (Marine Eco-label) were devel­oped by the ini­tia­tive of man­u­fac­tur­ers. In the back­ground, there is man­u­fac­tur­ers’ moti­va­tion to set stan­dards which are suited to the real­ity of each coun­try and to acquire the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion at a lower cost.

On the other hand, posi­tions of pre­ced­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion brands such as FSC are being more firmly estab­lished and it is uncer­tain whether the late­comer cer­ti­fi­ca­tions can be rec­og­nized by the mar­ket. The key will be the level of late­comer cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tems and how they are eval­u­ated by con­sumers and pur­chas­ing man­agers in charge of green prod­ucts at corporations.