Filed under: Society + Media, Waste + Recycling | Tags: Add new tag, environment, FSC, KU, paper industry, rebecca lynch
By Rebecca Lynch
Fables of the Reconstruction seems an appropriate title for the field work research I did today. I found it all fascinating and somewhat disturbing at the same time. My group, consisting of Stacey Chance, Jennifer Wyand and myself, is doing our presentation on ‘business’. Without giving too much away, I interviewed a business owner today of a litho company.
Ok – I know. You may be asking how the printing business can be sooooo fascinating. It wasn’t the business per se – it was the process in which they have to go through to be FSC certified (that means they have paid thousands of dollars to get a peice of paper that says they are certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council). There was so much irony to it all. The rules to apply to be FSC certified are 300 pages long – 300 pages! And these are the guys who are overseeing the forest industry’s efforts on sustainability.
The paperwork and files that this business has to keep for their certification efforts are enormous AND, they have to have a guy on staff full time to keep up with the rules and procedures of the certification. I can see where this might have been someone’s good idea at one time, but it seems that the good idea got lost in translation – thus the fables of the reconstruction 
. Thank you R.E.M.
Here is a 2ish minute snippet that gives a brief overview of the FSC process -
