Most of you probably know there’s a debate raging in green building circles around proposed changes to the LEED Certified Wood credit. To receive credit for using sustainably forested wood products, previous versions of LEED required that 50% of your wood be Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified. For a decade or more the industry-backed Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) has waged a campaign for it’s standard to be accepted- and USGBC’s current draft of the certified wood credit does just that- effectively offering partial credit for SFI certified products. Alex Wilson lays out the specifics of the proposed credit here. And there is a good overview of the controversy from the New York Times last year here.
FSC is a standard with significant teeth and for small timber firms the costs of certification can be a hurdle (though something like 30,000 have done it.) To some, having only one wood standard has felt like a monopoly. Others have pointed out that SFI was created by the big timber trade association, the American Forest & Paper Association, and figure it has simply been created to water down certified wood standards. Certainly, the first version of SFI was almost comically lenient- but they’ve improved things significantly in recent years. Chris Hayes and the Cascadia GBC are on the side of FSC. SFI claims Green Globes and the Australian GBC as supporters.
Here at Urban Green we find ourselves collectively on the fence. FSC has penetrated a relatively small percentage of the timber market so you can argue it’s not having a transformative effect on the industry and that allowing partial credit for more lenient standards might improve baseline forestry practices for a greater segment of the market. Basically, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. On the other hand, there are suspicions that big timber companies might not care so much about getting their wood used on the still tiny percentage of projects that pursue LEED certification. What they might care more about is the marketing potential of saying their timber is sustainably harvested, according to LEED and USGBC. It’s not an easy argument to resolve, but the USGBC is about to try. We’ll let you know when the next draft of the Certified Wood credit is released.
Lastly, I’ll note that there’s a similar struggle happening in Europe, as they try to set in place standards to ensure their imported timber has been harvested legally.
