Coming Soon to a Store Near You:
'Certified' Wood

By Mike Blain
The Free Press

Just as some people are willing to pay more for vegetables that are certified as being organically grown, many consumers say they would pay more for lumber they know was harvested from a sustainably managed forest.

While the overwhelming majority of lumber yards and home repair mega-stores like Eagle don't yet carry "certified" wood, don't be surprised to see it soon.
"Certification is a really big issue," says Jean Stem of the Forestland Mangement Committee in Olympia. Stem is involved with efforts to standardize guidelines for certification and is working to bring sustainably harvested wood to stores around the Northwest.
The oldest and largest forest certification effort is the "Smart Wood" program run by the Rainforest Alliance, based in New York city. The program has been certifying sustainably harvested tropical wood for nearly a decade and has recently turned its attention to temperate forests.
Smart Wood gives its stamp of approval to forest products that come from "sustainable" and "well-managed" forests. These operations must emphasize watershed protection and biological conservation, as well has the long-term stability of the forest. Smart Wood also certifies companies that process, manufacture, or sell products made from certified wood.
Scientific Certification Systems, based in Oakland, Calif., runs another certification program which gives approved projects a "Green Cross" indicating that the wood is certified.
SCS compares the rate of harvest to the rate of replanting and new growth, and also looks at the impact of logging on wildlife habitat and watersheds.
Forestry consultant Roy Keene says he and a couple of associates "cooked up the first large-scale certification scheme on the West Coast" when developing a plan for evaluating the Collins-Alminor forest in Northern California. Keene was working as a subcontractor for SCS at that time, and he gave the Collins Pine Company high marks for its forestry program.
After that, Keene claims, SCS took his plan, put its stamp on it, and called it its own. "They basically stole our thunder," he adds. According to Keene, SCS has since gone on to certify some forests that are not practicing sustainable forest practices.
This all begs the question: Who certifies the certifiers?
"The problem is the forest owners paid SCS to come out and do this," says Keene. If certifiers make money when they approve a logging operation, he adds, then they "will oftentimes flex around the hard issues in order to get the job."
If wood certification starts catching on with consumers, some fear that large timber companies might jump on the bandwagon with their own not-so-strict certification programs. "They'll come out with their own label of what's certified and confuse it all," says Stem.
At Ft. Lewis, forester Jim Rhode says he is aware of wood certification programs, but the base is currently not involved in any efforts to have its lumber certified.
Rhode is also skeptical of certification labels. "If a person can make money by being a certifier, than all of the sudden you get all of these people who say, 'Yeah, I'm a certifier.' So after awhile it doesn't have any meaning."
Keene says that timber from Ft. Lewis would easily be approved under any certification program now in operation, no matter how strict the standards.
All of Ft. Lewis' timber now goes to mills where it is mixed in with other timber that wasn't neccesarily harvested sustainably. This makes it virtually impossible for anyone to track down the wood and buy it at a lumber yard if, for example, they wanted to use Ft. Lewis lumber to frame a house.
In Seattle, Home Base occasionally stocks lumber from the Collins Pine Company and Enviresource carries SCS and Green Cross certified wood, as well as other third-party certified lumber.
"We know exactly where everything came from," says Matt Freeman-Gleason, one of the co-owners of Enviresource. Not every source is as good as he'd like, he adds, calling the whole field of wood certification a "minefield," but he can give customers detailed information about the source of each piece of lumber.
"The reality is," he says, "the supply just isn't out there."

For more information, contact:

The Forestland Management Committee
8400 Rocky Lane SE
Olympia, WA 98513
(360) 459-0946

Enviresource
1724 4th Ave. S.
Seattle WA 98134
(206) 682-7332

Scientific Certification Systems
Forest Conservation Program
Ordway Building, One Kaiser Plaze, Suite 901
Oakland, CA 94612
(510) 832-1415

Rainforest Alliance
65 Bleeker St.
New York, NY 10012
(212) 677-1900



Related Stories:
New Improved Forestry!
Operation Sustainable Forestry




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Contents on this page were published in the December/January, 1996 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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