In February 2015 Empatika joined the WWF-UK’s Forest Campaign.

As part of that we pledged to:

1. Buy timber and timber products only from sustainable sources by 2020 and make our performance public on this page.

2. Support the call for the EU to close the loopholes in the current EU Timber Regulation, so that all timber and timber products must be from legal sources.

3. Support the call for the UK government and the EU to complete the transition to a market in sustainable timber and timber products by 2020.

Additional steps and detail of what we will work

4. Use wood that is legal and traceable, such as certified wood.

5. Use recycled material where possible. We already use chipboard, which itself uses partly new certified materials and partly recycled materials, e.g. wood that comes from old building sites. Sometimes we can also use a customer’s old furniture to make something completely different.

6. Use certified wood with full chain of custody, i.e. Buy wood that is certified from sustainable sources.

7. Work towards being F#C certified. This means becoming the final part of the chain of custody, if one part of the chain is not F#C certified, then the next cannot be F#C certified either. Certified wood is wood that can be traced through every supplier back to the forest it was grown in, which must also be certified and therefore sustainable.

8. We will aim to only buy from UK and Ireland sources. The wood we use is grown in Ireland, manufactured in the UK, and the chipboard we use is manufactured in the UK from part-recycled materials and part-certified materials. We purchase mdf and chipboard, using well-known, certified suppliers.

9. Where we buy from local suppliers on the spot – which represents less than 5% of our purchasing – we will ensure we get the evidence to prove the timber we buy is either legal or certified.

10. We don’t use tropical timbers in our business because we are able to source what we want sustainably from domestic sources.

11. We will continuously research new, more sustainable products and wood board as and when technology improves, and materials become available in the UK market. Our director collects and talks about eco materials from around the world, click here to see more about it.

Note from our director Tristan Titeux

“We are a small company providing a very bespoke service to private clients, and I am taking it on myself personally to make my customers more aware of the issues that concern our environment and to do something about it together before it’s too late. I am very passionate about not taking more than we can and not destroying things like our amazing forests, that have been around for thousands of years. We cannot rob our children of the resources they will also need to use in the future. Taking action to be sustainable and sharing our resources fairly and equitably is what we want to do – I hope you share my view and decide to be a part of it.”