Forest Stewardship Council U.S.

Mission: To create a marketplace that promotes responsibly-managed forests by ensuring forestry practices are environmentally responsible, socially equitable, and economically viable.

Vision: FSC seeks a world where buyers and sellers of wood and paper are empowered to makes responsible choices through the use of FSC certification. We strive to build trust in our brand every day and thereby rebuild trust in the practice of responsible forestry. By creating value in working forests, we will create a marketplace that rejects unsustainable and irresponsible forest products.

In the early 1990s, an international group of leaders in business, human rights, and the environment came together to develop standards for responsible forest management and for ensuring the integrity of the products we derive from them. These visionaries were responding to the many threats to the world’s forest ecosystems, which have only accelerated since.

The Forest Stewardship Council® was born in 1994. As a market-based reform effort, FSC’s vision was extraordinarily ambitious: use the power of businesses and consumers to create the world’s first economically prosperous, socially beneficial, and environmentally responsible model for the management of the world’s forests.

FSC US is the largest national office of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the global leader in forest and forest products certification. FSC is experiencing extraordinary growth in demand in the US and now represents an estimated 5% total market share of U.S. forest products, though much higher in certain sectors. FSC competes in diverse markets, such as building materials, paper, packaging, and furniture, and FSC-certified products are available at all major national retailers. Currently over 164 million acres of North American forestland is FSC certified (460 million acres globally). Nearly 5,000 North American companies are certified under FSC’s chain of custody standards (over 30,000 globally). See www.fsc.org for more information.