Rare Amazon trees are being cut down by criminal loggers and turned into luxury garden decking. And it’s for sale throughout the UK at at builders merchant Jewson, say Greenpeace campaigners. Greenpeace have reported Jewson to the UK government regulator. But they say that if we kick off a big enough threat to their reputation as a responsible company, we could get them to stop selling dodgy wood in days, not months, through the use of a huge and fast-growing petition. The petition can be accessed at
https://secure.greenpeace.org.uk/amazontimber

The criminal loggers use sophisticated scams to give their illegal timber a legitimate-sounding cover story. You won’t find Amazon timber at B&Q and Homebase - but you will at Jewson. A two-year Greenpeace investigation and an undercover sting in April have revealed they buy wood from the riskiest part of Brazil, where almost 80% of logging is illegal.

A salesman for Jewson’s partner company told an undercover investigator that the paperwork from Brazil, claiming to show where the timber comes from, is "not worth much more [than] what it's written on”.

The Amazon rainforest is living, breathing, vast and beautiful. It’s home to millions of animal, plant, insect and bird species. Yet criminal loggers smash roads right through it to get to rare trees, roads that are often later used to start fires for illegal land clearance.

Recently, another Greenpeace petition persuaded Oriental & Pacific Tuna to stop using fishing methods that kill turtles and sharks after targeting their biggest retailer, Tesco. similar tactics worked to make Procter & Gamble agree to stop buying palm oil from companies that destroy Indonesia’s rainforests.

Greenpeace say Jewson claim that the wood it sells is legal but the only evidence they can point to is exactly the same paperwork used by criminal gangs to disguise illegal timber.