Construction Informer

Discover the Essence of Eco-Friendly Wood: For all of those concerned about just what constitutes eco-friendly wood products, and how to spot greenwashing when it comes to product claims, there is a recently released source that might shed some light. EcoTimber has prepared a guide that shows what Forest Stewardship Council standards mean and tells why they are more stringent than other standards. Other things covered in the guide include FSC certification, LEED credits, wood treatments and finishes and a look at hardwood flooring products.

International Builder Gets Creative to Move Properties: PJ Doherty Construction was having trouble selling the last homes in a development in Northern Ireland so it sweetened the pot. For each one sold it offered to throw in a brand new, furnished 410 square foot apartment in its Privacy Beach Resort on the Black Sea in Bulgaria. Doherty said it was time to “be adventurous with the market.”

Saudi Arabia Shows As Construction Bright Spot on the Globe: For the first quarter of 2009 Saudi Arabia is expecting a ground swell of construction activity as the building permits issued for that time period increased more than 200 percent over the previous quarter. Because of that the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency predicted a decline in residential rental prices as the surge is in residential construction. At the same time construction costs are expected to drop due to declining costs of iron and cement. Median rentals for new, mid-sized apartments are in the neighborhood of $10,000.

In a recent post I wrote about how the downturn in home building could drive up electricity costs and that trees that would have been made into lumber are instead being chipped up to use as fuel for electrical generation facilities. This is one small part of an on-going debate about the proper way to use and manage our forests and a micro-debate about what wood is considered to be the most "green."

Whenever a company wants to build according to green standards it often looks to the US Green Building Council’s (USBG), Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) as the way to certify what it is doing as being green. It’s basically a points-based system with points being awarded for doing certain things. One of the things that can be done under Credit 7 has to do with choosing to use wood that is certified as coming from a place that encourages environmentally friendly forest management. Who certifies forest management schemes as being environmentally friendly you ask? Well there are several organizations all with varying certification standards. Two of the most prominent are:

• the Forest Stewardship Council, FSC, a non-profit;
• and the Sustainable Forest Initiative, SFI, an newly independent non-profit.

The SFI first appeared in 1994 as a committee of the AF&PA (American Forest and Paper Association) that was charged with a task to create a program that would "visibly improve industrial forest practices and report results."  Out of that evolved the SFI program with principles and guidelines for implementing practices that would achieve the objectives, and later included certification aspects. In 2007 this program became an independent non-profit.

Apparently the US Green Building Council discounts SFI’s and other’s certifications and instead favors the standards and certification scheme of FSC by only crediting FSC-certified wood products for LEED ratings. The president of the SFI recently questioned that, and asked if "FSC wood from Indonesia or a plantation in Brazil was really better positioned to be featured in North American green buildings than SFI-certified wood from Maine, Canada’s boreal or a southern yellow pine forest in Georgia."

The FSC was created in 1993 partly because of "the failure of an intergovernmental process to agree on a global forest compact, and the compelling question-what is sustainable forestry?” It was formed by loggers, foresters, environmentalists and sociologists. For its part FSC doesn’t directly address its monopoly position relevant to LEED but in general ways says its standards are superior since it is the only one that "prohibits the use of genetically modified trees, prevents the conversion of natural forest to plantations and requires a precautionary approach to management of areas with high conservation value."

I suppose there are some good aspects to having multiple creators of standards and multiple certifiers. If the reasons for that are to encourage a wider platform of investigation, and thought, it can be beneficial. But if it’s just to protect some economic interests (and I’m not sure that’s the case here) it seems the effort could be better expended on something else. Massive duplication of effort robs us of energy and resources for other things that need attention.