The Tyee, a Canadian online news magazine, ran a 5-part series this week on the SFI vs. FSC forestry certification debate. The series provides a lot of detail about the claims by both sides, as well as what the debate may mean for the future of the forestry and green building industries.
To recap, most of the fighting lately has to do with the U.S. Green Building Council’s proposed changes to what kind of wood it’s going to allow as part of its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building standards.
The Tyee may be based in British Columbia, but the series does a good job of demonstrating just how important this fight is for both sides across North America.
Part 1: Overview
Part 2: The FTC complaint against SFI
Part 3: The IRS complaint against SFI
Part 4: The FTC complaint against FSC
Part 5: What it all means for the future
FSC is worried that the Green Building Council is going to make the standards too loose, allow other wood certifications and in turn, loosen FSC’s monopoly on LEED. SFI, meanwhile, is worried that the Green Building Council is going to keep the standards too strict and keep rival certifications out.
The stakes couldn’t be higher because LEED building standards are the future of the industry, as Part 1 of the series points out:
Green building grew slowly. Years passed before LEED certified its first buildings. But today there are 4,890 LEED-certified buildings and more than 27,359 LEED-registered projects, comprising more than 8.8 billion square feet of construction.
Likewise, while green building represented just two per cent of the construction market in 2005, it is projected to grow to a quarter of all commercial and institutional building starts and 20 per cent of the value of residential starts by 2013.
That adds up to a U.S. green building sector soon be worth more than $80 billion a year.
check out the summary chart at bottom of page showing the regional variability of FSC — note that set asideof land requirements for FSC-Russia are 5% and for FSC-US Pacific Coast is 50% — when is a “standard” a “standard”? http://fairforestcertification.com/id6.html
A war on the forest products industry is a direct war on the free market – that is why this certification battle has been so prolonged, incessant and vicious. The entire American forest products industry is a mosaic, for the most part, of private property owners, small businesses ( logging companies, trucking companies, sawmills etc..) and the “engine” driving all of this are the pulp mills. I work as a consulting forester, in a region with high quality timber and with landowners that are committed to long term ownership and even then over 60 % of what we harvest every year is pulp grade. If you can attack and ultimately destroy the American pulp/paper industry you will pretty much destroy the entire forest products industry in this country. Do you think the snakes in these environmental groups and their shills in the MSM ( mainstream media) haven’t realized this? Of course they have and that is why we will never win this battle by only playing nice, in short always being on the defensive. We need, as an industry, to go on the offensive and fight back by asserting our rights as private property owners, educating the people of how important these rights are and demanding a rollback of taxes and regulations. That is the only solution that will work.