Protect endangered Forests and Wildlife. Comments Needed by February 1

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Stop Timber Industry Greenwashing

Comments Needed by February 1

The timber industry's American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) is pressuring the Green Building Council to promote wood from forests logged under the AF&PA's "business as usual" Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) standards. The American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) is the most powerful timber trade association in the world. Its member companies include the largest loggers in the United States and Canada and the largest wholesale distributors of global wood products.

The construction and renovation of commercial and residential buildings in the U.S. consumes vast quantities of wood often from endangered forests or forests managed as ecologically impoverished tree plantations.

The U.S. Green Building Council is now soliciting public comments for LEED's New Construction Rating System. (LEED stands for "Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design." For more info on LEED, see below) If LEED credits the SFI certification system it would make the LEED's standards misleading and ineffective at reducing environmental impacts, since the SFI allows and certifies destructive, business-as-usual industrial logging, such as large-scale clearcutting and logging of old growth and other endangered forests. The SFI also doesn't track most of its wood, and allows non-SFI wood to be marketed as SFI certified.


Maxxam/Pacific Lumber has gotten SFI certification, an indication of how meaningless it is. For photos of SFI-certified timber operations, including PL's, go to the Don't Buy SFI website

As it stands now, the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED standards encourage architects and builders to use wood from more environmentally benign sources, like forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). There are problems with FSC as well, but SFI certification is much worse, being completely driven by timber industry motives.


Please urge the US Green Building Council to:


1. Not give credit or recognition to wood certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), the Canadian Standards Association, or other weak, industry-dominated logging standards. The SFI allows and certifies non-renewable practices like: the logging of old growth, imperiled species' habitats, and unprotected wilderness/roadless areas; the elimination of biodiversity through the conversion of diverse natural forests to monocultural tree farms; and logging at rates faster than trees can re-grow. The SFI also allows other harmful, business-as-usual logging practices like gigantic clearcuts, excessive use of toxic chemicals, and management for only a few of a forest's native tree and wildlife species. The SFI also lacks a mandatory "chain of custody" system to verify where SFI "certified" wood comes from.


2. Only give credit and give recognition to wood from forest certification systems that provide equal or greater protection to sensitive, non-renewable forest resources and forests' long-term ecological productivity.


Public comments on the proposed revised LEED standards (LEED NC) are due February 1.


To comment, go to: http://www.usgbc.org/News/usgbcnews_details.asp?ID=1156 .
The standards are at: http://www.usgbc.org/Docs/LEEDdocs/NCCC%20v2%202%20MASTER_public_1.pdf

More on the AF&PA SFI:


Visit www.dontbuysfi.com for:
· Photos of SFI certified forest destruction.
· Factsheets with examples of SFI certified companies that destroy endangered forests.
· Factsheets and reports explaining problems with the SFI's standards.
· Factsheets comparing the SFI and the Forest Stewardship Council.

More on the LEED Standards:
The LEED New Construction (NC) standard is the USGBC's flagship standard, and influences other standards like the new LEED standard for homes. The proposed changes to LEED NC would still provide credit for FSC certified wood (i.e., MR Credit 7). However, a new "renewable resource" standard (MR Credit 6) would also provide credit for use of any wood from "sustainable management systems." These "sustainable management systems" are poorly defined, but explicitly include the AF&PA's SFI and other weak forest certification systems.

Standards for renewable materials need to look beyond whether new trees are grown, and examine whether the ecosystems that produced the trees are also renewed. American Lands, the organization that first put this alert out states that the FSC is the only forestry system that meets LEED's goal of transforming building practices by recognizing the most (i.e., top 25%) environmentally responsible practices. The SFI, by contrast, certifies business-as-usual logging on most industrial forests in the U.S. The new LEED standard's distinction between certification and "sustainable management systems" will not help much, since the new standard would applaud the SFI as being "sustainable" and give builders credit for using SFI wood.









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