Natural Collection

Ethical Purchasing

Natural Collection is a catalogue company with a real commitment to ethical purchasing. Their policy states: ‘At Natural Collection we choose the products that we believe benefit ourselves and the environment, but we also seek out products from suppliers with integrity and vision who aim to create and choose products with social and environmental consideration’.

The Natural Collection catalogue has been successfully selling FSC certified products for several years. They have a trademark resource pack from the FSC UK office and use the FSC logo in their catalogues to advertise their products and their commitment to responsible purchasing.

When Natural Collection find new FSC certified product lines that they want to include in their catalogue, they phone up the FSC UK office to check the certification status of the supplier. This has come in handy on a number of occasions when new products have been found at trade fairs, but on investigation, although the manufacturer is certified, the wholesale supplier isn’t. While it’s OK for wholesalers to sell labelled products without their own chain of custody certification, the fact that they haven’t been audited by an FSC accredited certification body means that the chain ends with them and those that buy from them cannot advertise the products as FSC certified. For this reason it’s vital for suppliers to Natural Collection to have a valid chain of custody certificate for the products they sell: Natural Collection will certainly want to advertise their FSC certified products in their catalogues!

Thu 1 Dec 2005