Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) Certification
How to create commercially viable products promoting responsible forestry practices, building stakeholders' trust and ensuring timber legality
SFI is a North American program comprising of Forest Management, Fiber Sourcing, Chain of Custody (COC) and Certified Sourcing:
- Forest Management: it includes measures to help protect water quality, biodiversity, wildlife habitat, species at risk and forests with exceptional conservation value. It applies to any organization in the United States or Canada that owns or manages forestlands.
- Fiber Sourcing: it helps promote responsible forestry practices. It applies to organizations that do not own or manage land but do procure wood directly from forests.
- COC: it ensures the origin and traceability of products from sustainable origin. It applies to any organization that sources, processes, manufactures, handles, trades, converts or prints forest-based products.
- Certified Sourcing: it tells buyers and consumers that fiber comes from a company that is certified to the SFI 2022 Fiber Sourcing Standard, or comes from recycled content, or from a certified forest.
Certification Process
- Application for RINA certification
- Review of the certification application and offer definition
- Contract opening (in case of acceptance of the offer), and planning of evaluation activities
- On-site verification at the company's production site(s)
- Review of all information and results related to the assessment
- In the event of a positive outcome, issue of the certificate (valid for 5 years)
Following the issue of the certificate, "Surveillance Audits" must be carried out annually from the date of first certification. The duration of SFI certification is five years, renewable at the end of the five-year period.
Why RINA?
RINA is accredited by ASI (Assurance Services International) for FSC® COC (Licence Code FSC® A000532) and by ACCREDIA for PEFC COC, and in application process with ANAB for accreditation in SFI (Forest Management, Fiber Sourcing, Chain of Custody and Certified Sourcing). Our audit teams, technical experts and local managers are made up of professionals with high expertise in forestry sector.
