In December, reporters for Ethical Corporation braved the pre-Christmas retail crush and did some mystery shopping in the stores of UK high-street furniture retailers to discover how much staff knew about their employers’ timber sourcing policies.

The ethics of timber sourcing have been on retailers’ radar screens for years. And since the high-profile Greenpeace campaigns in the mid-1990s exposed the vulnerabilities and illegal origins of timber hailing from Vietnamese factories, most major companies involved in the trade have devised ethical timber sourcing programmes.

However, despite a surge in certification schemes and well-intentioned policies, some of the results are taking a long time to trickle down to the shop floor.

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