International forestry certification company Rainforest Alliance will conduct audits of failed timber company Gunns Ltd plantations next month for Forest Stewardship Council compliance. Source: The Examiner
The audits started in 2011 on Gunns plantations in Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria and in Tasmania last year as part of the company’s determination to have its plantation timber stamped as controlled wood standard certified under FSC.
Gunns receivers and managers KordaMentha continued the process to keep the timber still being harvested as a saleable commodity and to maintain the company’s assets for future sale, a spokesman said yesterday.
The spokesman said that about 120 contractors were still involved in harvesting and hauling from Gunns plantations.
“They are all on contracts for the next 12 months,” the spokesman said.
“If there was no certification, people wouldn’t buy the timber and these people would not have work.”
Rainforest Alliance spokeswoman Anita Neville said that Gunns had first applied for controlled wood standard certification on its plantation timber in Western Australia and the Green Triangle plantations in South Australia and Victoria in March 2011.
The company applied in October of the same year to have the scope of the audit for certification expanded to include its Tasmanian plantations.
This was achieved at the end of June last year.
Neville said that the five-year certification process in which Gunns was involved was not for full FSC certification but for certification of its wood lots so that they could be sold on to be mixed with FSC-certified goods.
Interested stakeholders are invited by Rainforest Alliance audit teams to comment on the company’s forest management in relation to the certification.
This year’s audit will start in Gunns’ West Australian plantations early next month.
