Public consultation: Bulgarian forest certification system

At its 2019 sustainability milestone summit, Walmart announced that for the first time, checkout carousels at its U.S. stores will include reusable bags that will be available to customers for purchase. The aim of this new campaign is to help reduce plastic waste and increase customer convenience by placing reusable bags in easy to find and highly frequented sections of its stores. As part of the launch, Walmart is rolling out a new assortment of reusable bags that are made with post-consumer recycled content. The new reusable bag initiative will begin rolling out to stores next month and follows a recent announcement by Walmart on a series of plastic waste reduction goals that seek to advance the sustainability of the retailer’s private brand packaging by making it 100 percent recyclable, reusable or industrially compostable by 2025. This year’s milestone summit also featured announcements and updates on several other sustainability initiatives. For example, the event marks the two-year anniversary of Project Gigaton, a platform in which Walmart is working with suppliers to avoid 1 billion metric tons, a gigaton, of emissions from global value chains by 2030. Click Read More below for additional detail.

FSC met with representatives of Domtar to discuss the potential implications of the transfer of the beneficial ownership of Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) to Mr. Jackson Wijaya (the current beneficial owner of Domtar) and to agree on the next steps forward in the legal review of the corporate and ownership links between Domtar and APP. We understand that the transfer of the beneficial ownership of APP to Mr. Jackson Wijaya has not yet taken place, and no details are available to us on the date of the expected transfer. The parties agreed to cooperate on a fast and rigorous process of review to examine the shareholding and ownership relationships, if any, between Domtar and APP because of this planned transfer. This review will be commissioned immediately and concluded after the transfer of beneficial ownership of APP to Jackson Wijaya is complete.

The Vietnam Forest Certification Office (VFCO) is our latest member that has achieved PEFC endorsement of its national forest certification system. “Realising that our national standards meet and even exceed the global sustainability benchmark in sustainable forest management strengthens our belief that we are on the right track to build an accessible national forest certification system. PEFC endorsement has recognized all our national collective efforts,” said Dr. Nguyen Quoc Tri, Director General of the Vietnam Administration Forest. The certification of 12,000 hectares of Acacia and Rubber plantation by VFCS before the endorsement by PEFC has shown the substantial determination of Vietnamese stakeholders to make the national system work.