Besides participating in the event, FSC’s Asia Pacific region also held a partner event entitled “FSC’s impacts in Asia Pacific on the forestry and value chains – perspectives from the private sectors and partners”, where we invited Tetra Pak Korea, WWF and NEPCon to join us and talked about collaboration opportunities and synergies with market-based approaches, including increasing market access, promoting legality assurance and embrace the changing business environment.
Our partner event attracted more than 30 professionals from the pulp, paper and packaging companies, certificate holders, and representatives from industry associations, governments and government-affiliated organisations to attend.
In the opening address, Anthony Sebastian, member of the FSC International Board of Directors, presented a brief overview of FSC’s global strategic plan. He emphasised that FSC’s certification and market-access scheme remains a high- value proposition to our certificate holders, and maintaining this value proposition means FSC will focus on providing real and inspirational incentives to help stop deforestation in the world. While Jayco Fung, Head of Market Development and Interim Director of the FSC Asia Pacific Regional Office(pictured above, right), gave the latest market insights, updates and positive impacts brought to the region.
Jimmy Kim(pictured above), Circular Economic Expert, Tetra Pak Korea, shared their journey on why and how the company have been supporting and sourcing FSC-certified material for their packaging and putting FSC label on the packages to increase the consumer awareness of the importance of responsible sourcing. So far the company has produced more than 460 billion labelled packages.
Karen Mo, Lead, Research & Development, Forest, WWF International, provided an insightful perspective on how FSC should play on a more complementary role, especially related to the regulatory frameworks, while Adam Grant from NEPCon talked about the use of certification in the due diligence process. As the International Business Development Director of one the of world’s largest auditing organisations, he also shared his first-hand experience on how the perception of sustainability has changed over the past two decades, all the way from consumers all the way across the value chains to companies and to the governments.
After Janet Zhang, our Supply Chain Integrity Manager, Asia Pacific, FSC International introduced the latest technologies and tool to protect and enhance our supply chain integrity, the partner event ended with an interactive panel discussion, where we further explored the future role of certification and how FSC, with its latest development, could better complement the evolving government legality system and corporate legality compliance. Hopefully, the force brought together by legality and certification can create a level playing field.
During the trip in South Korea, Jayco Fung, Head of Market Development and Interim Director of the FSC Asia Pacific Regional Office, also met with Samsung representatives in the Samsung Digital City on 24 June, where they discussed how FSC can help the uptake of responsible sourcing in order to help the company to protect the forests and the environment for the generations to come. Senior professionals from the Sustainability Team and Integrated Marketing Communication and Global Customer Satisfaction Team for Mobile Communications Business were at the meeting. Currently, the company have some packagings of the phone models in the US market FSC-labelled, such as Samsung Galaxy A50.
As Korea is a priority market for FSC in the Asia Pacific, an FSC Market Development Manager for Korea, based in Seoul, will soon commence duty to support and deliver a co‐ordinated market development and value chain plan in the country. Stay tuned for further announcement.