Sveza shares expertise on sustainable forestry

Sveza Group recently made it to the top five of RAEX’s ESG ranking, becoming the best ESG performer in the Russian forest industry. In one of the webinars from the RAEX-Sustainability webinar series, an expert from Sveza shared insights about how sustainable forestry principles can be applied to supply chain management and described the principles guiding the company’s relations with the timber harvesting companies.

Marina Korelskaya, supply chain certification manager from Sveza’s wood procurement division, talked about the company’s best practices in managing over 500 timber suppliers, and explained how adherence to sustainable forestry principles brought Sveza to a top position in the ESG ranking.

Sveza has seven plywood mills that buy plywood logs from 23 regions of Russia. Over 60% of the company’s business partners are local timber harvesting companies working in the regions where Sveza has plywood mills. The company has a monitoring and control system in place to track the origin of timber to the area where the tree originally grew, which helps eliminate mixing risks in the supply chains, and to manage social and environmental risks inherent in forest management operations. Tight national forest legislation and the national forest inventory system LesEGAIS are two extra tools to ensure transparency in the work with the harvesting partners.

Sveza continues to improve its timber supplier relations and organizes educational sessions where the harvesting professionals learn how plywood is made and how the quality of raw timber influences the quality of the finished product. In addition, Sveza shares with its partners the methodology and information on how to build efficient internal processes to meet sustainable forestry criteria.

“Good partnership relations with our timber suppliers are Sveza’s most important achievement in developing sustainable supply chains, allowing us to grow and improve together through continuous monitoring and risk management in particular,” said Marina Korelskaya, supply chain certification manager at Sveza.