Legal Verified with Chain of Custody
The First Step Toward Fully Certified Sustainable Forest Management
In response to a heightened awareness of the environmental issues our planet faces, government regulations around tropical wood have become much more stringent. Many of these regulations now provide for criminal penalties for any company that knowingly imports illegally harvested wood.
The Tropical Forest Foundation’s (TFF) Legal Verified with Chain of Custody® (CoC) program helps negate this risk by providing a standard for legality and help with independent auditing to confirm to customers and the authorities that tropical wood products are legal for sale in countries around the world. The TFF Legal Verified® program provides a widely recognized standard to verify that manufacturers have performed due diligence and buyers can be assured that their products will meet acceptable standards of legality. This program is the first step toward achieving full compliance with TFF’s RIL Verified Standard®.
The Legal Verified with Chain of Custody® Mark
TFF’s Legal Verified with Chain of Custody® (CoC) mark is granted by TFF when a company meets minimum entry-level requirements – including a third-party verification of legality and CoC systems, and an action plan to implement reduced impact logging.
The “Legal Verified®” mark asserts that the tropical wood is from a legal origin. TFF’s verification is not only required for entry into TFF’s forest-market linking program but also the first step toward achievement of TFF’s more stringent, RIL Verified® mark.
Legality standards reflect the regulatory requirements of national forest management jurisdictions and are, therefore, by definition, country specific.
Country specific standards defining legality can be obtained directly from the TFF regional program office.
TFF Verification Services
TFF has formulated minimum requirements for the establishment of a CoC verification system, including the entity that holds the harvesting mark and all other entities that trade, store and process RIL Verified® products. CoC audits must be performed by an internationally recognized auditor using evaluation standards that meet (or exceed) the minimum requirements formulated by TFF.
The CoC verification system must incorporate widely accepted principles of marking, documentation, and administration. All parties in the CoC verification must have systems in place which identify, document and separate the flow of logs and derived products from a RIL Verified® or Legal Verified® source from non-verified logs and products. TFF recognizes two systems, the Physical Separation System and the Inventory Control and Accounting System, during the auditing process. Based on a timber organization’s ability to comply with all of TFF’s verification requirements, TFF will issue a Legal Verified with Chain of Custody® mark.
