Worldwide, consumers are beginning to realize that their consumption has impacts in other regions and countries. As a result, they are increasingly looking for assurance that those impacts are socially and environmentally acceptable. For example, child labor has seen considerable press lately, and the apparel industry is responding by implementing third-party auditing of labor practices in their foreign factories. The forest industry faces similar societal pressures to assure consumers that its practices are not harming the environment.

In 1996, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation funded a series of case studies to document businesses practicing sustainable forestry to identify the impacts on corporate profitability and forest management. The project working group included more than 30 researchers from Pennsylvania State University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. Weyerhaeuser and other private companies and non-government organizations were also involved. From the early expectation that sustainable forestry would be supported by premium prices customers might pay, researchers came to the conclusion that sustainable forestry involves many other benefits and is often simply good business practice.

Eric Hansen (Forest Products) got involved with this project because of the Sustainable Forestry Partnership's interest in developing a seminar series on forest certification. Steve Radosevich (Forest Science), who led the effort, wanted representation of the business side of the issues. At the same time, Hansen was working on developing an environmental marketing cooperative course in Finland and so could offer another perspective on sustainability and certification.

Third-party certification has been an important consideration in sustainable forestry. Support for certification in Europe has been developing quickly; that's necessarily a concern for the state, as Oregon's products could find themselves shut out of the market. With the OEDD (Oregon Economic Development Department), Hansen and his colleagues in the College of Forestry, the Oregon Department of Forestry, and elsewhere developed a white paper to inform the governor about certification and what it means.

Hansen has continued related studies. The first cases were of forestry production in the United States and Scandinavia and retailing in the United States and the United Kingdom. It seemed the next step should be to study the other main player in Europe, the German publishing industry. The well-documented case studies illustrate company experiences in working toward sustainability and opportunities for conversion to sustainable practices.

Case studies are conducted quite differently from traditional empirical research. A significant element is building effective relationships with key people within the firm being studied. The Sustainable Forestry Partnership seminars had invited representatives of Collins Pine and Home Depot/Sainsbury's, giving Hansen connections to the people he needed to reach. For the case study of Collins Pine, researchers went onsite at four sites across the US; for the Home Depot study, they visited headquarters and stores in four states. For the UK study of the retailer Sainsbury's, they visited headquarters in London and stores there and in nearby areas. To study the big Swedish forest company, STORA, they spent a week at headquarters in Falun and at nearby locations. After each site visit, researchers and staff at the companies being studied exchanged many emails, letters, and phone calls to make sure the researchers had their facts straight. Among the several case studies, Hansen wound up with 100s of pages of transcripts of interviews, observations, and emails.

Projects like these require the joint efforts of many researchers. On these, Hansen worked with Steve Lawton (project manager) and Jim McAlexander, both of the OSU College of Business. From the College of Forestry came Stefan Weinfurter, who was at OSU for a year working on his senior thesis and is now back in Austria to finish his degree. Other participants included Rick Fletcher, Benton County Extension Forester, and John Punches, Douglas County Extension Forest Products and Forestry.

Hansen and his colleagues have now done several international presentations and many in the United States concerning experiences in marketing certified products; one was to the UN Economic Commission for Europe Timber Committee in Geneva, Switzerland.

Hansen and a colleague from Finland are now building on this past work to develop a discussion paper for the United Nations concerning what's happening in the US, Europe, and countries of the former Soviet Union with respect to forest certification. Beyond that, Lawton and Hansen are planning a conference on environmental marketing to be held in September 1999. The conference will inform industry about using environmental marketing strategies to compete better in the global market. Another planned project concerns the chain of custody of forest products, looking at how to track whether a given product really came from the forest specified, grown and processed under the required conditions. Establishing chain of custody takes careful controls at each processing point. The associated costs and challenges will be the focus of the study.