What is chain of custody and why is it important?

Most of the paper products consumed today are made with material from trees.  In general, these trees either come from a forest or from a tree farm.

If a company is concerned about its negative environmental and social impacts, it will answer and act on the following basic questions:

• What are the negative environmental and social impacts associated with the forest source of origin for the company’s paper products?
• If the source of origin for the company’s paper products is not a forest—instead, the source is a tree farm—what are the negative environmental and social impacts associated with that?

Answering these questions requires an adequate system to follow the chain of custody from the product on the shelf back to the source(s) of origin for the raw material in the product.

If the company does not have an adequate chain of custody system and a commitment to eliminate negative environmental and social impacts, the risk is that the company’s paper products may contain the following unacceptable components:

• Wood fiber from Endangered Temperate Rainforests (such as British Columbia's Inland Temperate Rainforest and Chile's native forests), pristine, ancient or old-growth forests (coastal British Columbia, Chile, the forests of the Sierra Nevada and Canada's Boreal), or from forests cut down illegally (Indonesia)
• Material from forests that extremely rare or endangered animals need to survive (Caribou in the Inland Temperate Rainforest, Darwin's fox in Chile)
  
• Wood fiber from a single-species tree farm that has replaced an Endangered Forest (U.S. South and Chile).