Environmental management systems: Assessing their level of use on industrial forestlands

Abstract

An industry-ẃide survey of the forest products industry was conducted to measured the development of environmental management systems (EMS) designed to implement sustainable forest management on industrial forestlands. The results indicated that larger capacity, publicly owned operations (i.e., paper or engineered forest products firms) that participated in a forest certification standard exhibited well-developed EMSs. Smaller capacity, privately owned operations, such as sawmills, had poorly or undeveloped EMSs. The study provides a valuable baseline by which to measure future EMS development in the forest products industry.