Tuesday 27 March 2012

Fair trade floor

Let me write this in English. The reason being that I want Bruce D. Uhler to be able to read and understand. He visited the Annual General Meeting of Världsbutiken i Kalmar earlier this evening and informed us about a new product: floor produced from Fair Trade timber from Chile. It is a product which is both Fair Trade and FSC certified. FSC is an abbreviation for Forest Stewardship Council. In Världsbutiken we sell food and handicraft. It fills me with hope that Fair Trade is becoming interesting for bigger companies like Kährs. One can read more on the Fair Trade blog. Also on the Svenska FSC website. We also felt chosen to host the second presentation of this product in Sweden. The first was at the Embassy of Chile. I really hope other manufacturers of wood product to follow.

1 comment:

Bruce said...

Anders
Thank you for the Världsbutiken supporters, and Daphne in particular, to invite us to your annual meeting and letting Helen and I discuss FSC-Fairtrade certified timber from Curacuatin, Chile last evening. The opportunity to develop fair trade with disadvantaged markets, reduce poverty and increase forest biodiversity with this new program is incredible. It is individuals and a group such as yours who have led the way with the creating the success of Fairtrade so far. It is now time that companies such as Kährs live up to their corporate social responsibility to lend their support as well. We are working today on this long-term, Fairtrade initiative and encouraging other producers to join in as well in Sweden. We have offered to share our knowledge of the wood, the Fairtrade process and CSR market opportunity with any company interested. We appreciate the hard work, passion and investments that SSC Forestry of Uppsala made for the new Logosol sawmill and certifications in Curacautin that are helping the cooperative of indigenous Mapuche and descendents of the pioneer farmers regain rights to the land. As I mentioned last night we are so happy that the very first dual labelled FSC-Fairtrade certified wood floor sold is now in transit to the ARI Asian Rural Institute, rebuilding after the March 11, 2011 earthquakes and then radiation fallout in Tochigi-ken,Japan. http://www.ari-edu.org/english/whatisari_e.html. The biggest supporter for FSC-Fairtrade wood is Rev. Suguru Matsuki with the JLER, Japan Lutheran Emergency Relief agency http://jler.org/en/index.html and he is also with the Wakachiai project, Fairtrade in Japan! http://www.wakachiai.com/ We appreciate Suguru's support beginning in June of 2011. Mvh, Bruce