The newly re-opened Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace is the centre of a Greenpeace investigation into use of timber from endangered rainforests.
The episode was reported front-page in the national press and covered on BBC 2’s Newsnight, where the issues were debated by Alhassan Attah of the Ghana Timber Export Development Division and Dr Alan Knight, head of social responsibility for B&Q‘s parent Kingfisher group.
Doors and other joinery inside the £20m gallery, re-opened as part of the Jubilee celebrations, are alleged to be made of unsustainable timber from Africa and Brazil.
Greenpeace says mahogany from the Amazon, Brazil, and African utile, sapele, iroko and mahogany were used, while wenge was used in parquet flooring. Pallisco, a company which logs in Cameroon, has been named as a company supplying utile wood for doors.
The allegations follow the recent ‘invasion’ of the Cabinet Office building, Whitehall, when Greenpeace activists protested at what they said was illegal timber being used in refurbishment work (TTJ April 13).
On Newsnight, presenter Jeremy Vine said that some of the timber used in the palace was reported to come from Ghana.
Mr Attah said that the country operated its own certification scheme and had a good record on sustainable management of its forests.
‘The fact that the product is not FSC certified does not mean it was not from a sustainable source. Ghana has good forest protection with a strong tradition in forest management.’
“We obviously don’t want to destroy our resources” |
Alhassan Attah, Ghana Timber Export Development |
He told Mr Vine that Ghanaians were keen to preserve their forests, for both environmental and commercial reasons.
‘We obviously don’t want to destroy our resources,’ he said.
Dr Knight said that B&Q favoured Forest Stewardship Certification for its timber and wood products.
‘There are many certification schemes operating around the world, how can we as a retailer judge the credibility of each one,’ he said. ‘FSC provides a credible umbrella scheme which can cover all the others.’
Mr Attah responded that different countries and different areas needed different approaches on certification.