MY SAMPLES

Our Environmental Policy

Watch a video on the effects of illegal logging

At Ted Todd we think it’s our responsibility to know exactly where our timber originates. If suppliers can’t prove where the timber has come from or that it has not been sourced in accordance with our strict environmental and ethical policy, we simply do not do business with them. We check the tree species in which we trade in to make sure that they are not CITES listed and where possible try to source independently verified FSC® certified or PEFC certified flooring which we supply under our FSC certificate TT-COC-002154 and PEFC certificate BMT-PEFC-0229

Some people in the trade are cynical – “it may be FSC but how can you prove it?”

An independent certification body goes to where the wood is grown and checks the forest management against strict environmental, social and economic criteria-and they keep visiting and checking-at least every year. If the forest management passes, then they sell the wood as FSC-certified. Every stage from the forest until we sell to you the FSC-certified flooring is independently checked by a certification body.

Choosing to buy responsibly Sourced Timber Flooring can help to:

  1. lock away carbon in a product that has a long life and is completely recyclable
  2. avoid chemical pollutants emitted by other flooring
  3. help other species by responsible management of their environment

Ironically, the responsible management of trees includes cutting them down. The important thing is that this is done with minimum damage to the environment, whilst helping local people to see the profitability of protecting their native habitat and planting more trees.

So, when you buy responsibly sourced wooden flooring, certified by an independent Forest Certification Scheme, you know that you are helping to protect the world’s trees. By buying wood products with a FSC logo, you are supporting the responsible management of the world’s forests to ensure that they still exist for our children, for biodiversity and the communities which depend on them. The more FSC products are demanded, the more forests will become certified to meet the demand.

Consequences:  Are you guilty of using, supplying or specifying illegally logged and endangered timber?

Every year an area half the size of the UK is cleared of natural forests: from temperate and tropical, North and South and on every continent. These forests, which once covered half the planet, are irreplaceable and their loss has a huge economic, social and environmental impact. Unknown numbers of people and countless species of plants and animals are wholly dependent on forests to live; forests support up to 1.6 billion of the world’s poorest people.

Last Year’s UN environment programme report, “The Last Stand of the Orang-utan” says that the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra are being cleared so rapidly that by the early 2020s the apes may well be extinct.

A wider problem is deforestation: as a result of the destruction and burning of Indonesia’s forest and peat lands for Palm Oil plantations, 1.8 billion tonnes of green house gas emissions are released according to Greenpeace. This means that 4% of global emissions are coming from 0.1% of the land on Earth.

Greenpeace have become more and more concerned about widespread illegal logging in the Democratic Republic of Congo, part of second largest tropical forest in the world after the Amazon. The sustainable management of the forests of the DRC-more than 21 million hectares of rainforest are now allocated to the logging industry, the DRC have introduced a moratorium on the allocation in 2002 but it has been widely violated. The area being logged is near Bikora, Equator province, which is part of the Lake Tumba region, an area identified as a priority region for conservation; high value species such as Wenge are being illegally logged for the European market. The forests are a critical habitat for the endangered bonobo apes and other threatened species such as forest elephants and hippopotamus. The area is also home to numerous communities of TWA pygmies and Bantus. “Logging companies promise us wonders: work, schools, hospitals, but actually they seem to be only interested in their own short term profits-what will happen when our forests have been emptied?”

Checks and Confirmation: