FSC database revised: Good news, bad news

Certificate Holder Portal and label generator

The same webpage now also includes a login section, the Certifcate Holder Portal. This is an exclusive resource for certifiate holders, providing access to trademark resources, an FAQ section and other features for certified companies.

One important feature is the on-line label generator, where certified companies can customize all the on-product labels that they need. This is a new version of the Labeling Publication System which certified companies have been using for a while. 

Since the label generator is built into the new system, access requires renewed login by existing certificate holders. We advise all of our clients to contact their NEPCon trademark service provider, if they haven't received new access information automatically or otherwise have trouble accessing the new label generator. 

The new trademark platform should also be more robust now as it is built into the new database; however, it seems less user-friendly than before. Previously, the user was able to see the label variations and choose between them. Now the user has to understand technical abbreviations such as: "Mixed Sources 1 -  FSC+CW+REC - no mobius loop" and choose between a number of such options before viewing a label.

Features lost: reduced market linkage value

While the upgrade has probably resulted in a more stable system, some important features of the previous version of the database have unfortunately been lost in the process:

• It is no longer possible to get almost real-time figures for the number of certificates globally or in a country, if the figure is above 1,000. The maximum number of hits shown for any seach is 1,000.
• It is no longer possible to sort the database according to e.g. name, date of certification, etc.  For example, previously it was easy to get an overview of the certificates issued during the last month;  this is now close to impossible.
• Only 20 hits are visible at any time, and there is no option for choosing to see more hits a a time. This reduces the user-friendliness for those who wish to gain the overview of what companies are certified within a country.

With the loss of these features, the FSC certificate database has lost a major part of its market linkage value. A company can no longer use the database to check on new certificates, to find new sources of certified raw material or new potential customers for its own certified products. 

In countries that are key FSC markets such as UK, the US and Germany, the number of certificates already exceeds 1,000. Additional countries, such as China and Japan, are very close to 1,000 certificates. For these countries, the option to use the database to obtain informaton about the number of active certificates has been or will soon be lost.

How to obtain an overview of FSC certificate numbers

So what options now exist for gaining a good overview of current FSC certificate numbers?

Reasonably recent key global figures are presented at FSC's website www.fsc.org (in the lower right corner of the main page), although not the near-real-time figures you could previously get via the database. 

Collated figures are released by FSC from time to time at www.fsc.org/facts-figures.html, however figures available there currently date back to the month of September. Considering the growth of the system, it would seem reasonable to provide such figures at least monthly, in particular since the options to get updated via the database are now rather limited. We also recommend FSC to further develop its new database to re-include the lost features in future. 

NEPCon's rating of the revised system

We recognize the need to develop a more stable database; however, several features that were really useful for certified operations have been lost in the process. Here's our rating of the current system: