An PEFC Chain of Custody certificate for products proves that the wooden parts of your certified products are possible to trace back to well-managed forests, company controlled sources or recycled material. COC certification allows companies that manufacture and market forest products to label them with the PEFC brand consistent with PEFC policies.

Since its launch in 1999, PEFC has become the world’s largest umbrella organisation for national forest certification schemes all over the world (and in particular, Europe and North America), ensuring the delivery of hundreds of millions of tonnes of wood to the processing industry and then onto the market place from tens of millions of hectares of certified forests.

PEFC has strong grass roots support from many stakeholders including the forestry sector, governments, trade associations, trade unions and non-governmental organisations. So successful has its approach been that many more schemes from around the world are joining, making PEFC a truly global opportunity.

Why is PEFC so successful?

• PEFC respects and relies on worldwide, internationally agreed processes for certification and sustainable forestry as the basis on which to build national certification standards and schemes. These processes include the inter-governmental processes for sustainable forest management developed in consultation with thousands of forestry experts and stakeholders from interested parties.

• PEFC provides a framework through which national and regional certification schemes can integrate internationally agreed criteria with their local circumstances. The forest
  management performance standards of national PEFC schemes are based on the results of inter-governmental processes such as the Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe. This conference grew out of the UN Conference on Environment and Development at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and is an on-going process. This ensures that, if the Ministerial Conference (representing the governments of 37 countries) agrees on changes in any aspect of sustainable forest management, those changes will be put into practice Through PEFC certification.

• National forest certification schemes remain independent but co-operate with each other under the PEFC umbrella to ensure that the wood from each scheme meets equivalent standards and so can be traded internationally.

• Through PEFC, customers, trade and industry all over the world can rely on the fact that forest management with PEFC certification in any country will exceed the internationally approved strict requirements.

• The open, transparent and democratic decision-making process of PEFC ensures the possibility of multiple stakeholder participation at local, national and international level. Its approach is anchored in active participation and implementation at grass roots level.

• The certification model applied by PEFC ensures that the procedures and their monitoring are always independent of one another, as separate professional bodies perform each of them.

PEFC has a range of labels:

The PEFC logo indicates that the products contains at least 70% certified material:
Only products which contain at least 70% PEFC certified material can be labelled with the PEFC logo. This is the highest minimum level set by any international forest certification system for the use of its label.

Recycled material is included in PEFC certification:
PEFC enables and encourages the use of recycled material in products. A combined label containing the PEFC logo and the Mobius Loop can be used by manufacturers on products which contain a minimum total content of certified and recycled material of 70%. The percentage of the proportion of the recycled material is stated inside the Mobius Loop.

PEFC Logo:
Only timber and paper products from PEFC endorsed systems can be traded and labelled with the PEFC logo. Only national forest certification systems, which have successfully gone through the stringent PEFC endorsement process, can use the PEFC logo on and for their certified products.

To be able to use a PEFC-label you have to be certified against the appropriate PEFC-standards. There are several different standards, for example for the different types of wood sources, and standards for different types of certificates, for example Multi-site, Group and Projects.

DNV is accredited by PEFC to provide PEFC CoC certification in Singapore.