On May 20, 2016, a legislator-sponsored bill passed the Diet and became the Act on Promotion of Use and Distribution of Legally-Harvested Wood and Wood Products ( “the Clean Wood Act”). (Link to a third-party website). It went into effect on May 20, 2017. Prior to the enactment of the Clean Wood Act, legality check was required under the Act on Promoting Green Purchasing applicable only to wood and wood products procured by the government. The Clean Wood Act requires the concerned business entities to endeavor to check legality on all wood and wood products defined by the Act, regardless of where they are to be supplied to the government or distributed in the private sector.

In compliance with the Clean Wood Act, business operators must endeavor to check the legality of the wood and wood products they handle, be they for public or private demand (best effort provisions). The checking should be carried out as due diligence (DD)*1 in the same manner as is required under the EU wood regulations. Business operators that carry out the legality check pursuant to the Act may register themselves at a government-recognized registration organization (optional). The state, when deemed necessary for proper implementation of the Act, may give guidance, advice or demand reports and conduct on-site inspections.

In response to the enactment of the Clean Wood Act, JPA developed the JPA’s Due Diligence System Manual for Legality Verification that helps the member companies to conduct DD on all timber raw materials beginning FY2018. The Manual is designed to assist the construction of an original DD system for a paper mill to address not only the Clean Wood Act but also the EU DD regulations, the US Lacey Act and the Australian Illegal Logging Prohibition Act.

On October 27, 2017, five organizations were announced publicly as the registration implementation organizations for the Clean Wood Act (Link to a third-party website).

Through the Forest Economic Research Institute which is a referral agency, JPA filed a registration application on behalf of the member companies and their affiliated companies with the Japan Gas Appliances Inspection Association (JIA). As of April 26, 2019, the number of JPA member companies and their affiliated companies registered there stand at 30.

The JPA services of registration under the Clean Wood Act and the DDS system for legality verification will be continued and improved to enhance objectivity and credibility in the framework of the Monitoring Service against Illegal Logging.

*1 Due diligence (“DD”) refers to the due care and effort that a person ought to take and make before taking an action, which is used in determining whether or not the person should be held legally liable or not for the outcome of the action.