Understanding Wood Product Certifications
by David Helmers
Homebuilders typically choose wood for structural framing because it is easy to use, durable and widely available.Now,with increased interest in building green, wood also plays an additional key role: Both lumber and engineered wood products provide a number of environmental advantages. But not all wood products are equally green. Certification by independent third parties can help ensure that wood building materials come from responsible sources.
With a wide range of certification programs available, it's important to know a few basics about what these programs offer and how builders can use certification to demonstrate their green commitment to homebuyers.
Green Benefits of Wood
Wood structural framing offers several environmental benefits, including the facts that it comes from a renewable and natural resource, helps offset greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and has low "embodied" energy or overall lifetime energy requirements.
Through photosynthesis, growing trees absorbs carbon dioxide (CO2)- a gas that contributes to global warming-and release oxygen back into the atmosphere. The carbon in the CO2 is the building block of compounds created during photosynthesis. Carbon is integral to the wood fiber and remains in wood products after the tree is harvested.
Wood also performs well in terms of the energy required to produce it.The Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials (CORRIM) conducted a study on the overall lifetime energy requirements for various framing materials using a method called life cycle assessment (LCA). LCA takes into account the energy required for the material to be extracted, harvested, manufactured, transported, constructed and maintained-also referred to as the embodied energy of the material. The consortium found that homes framed with wood have about 17 percent lower embodied energy than steel framing, and about 16 percent less than concrete framing.
Most wood building products store more carbon during their useful lives than is required to produce them. As a result, using wood products can help create a net benefit in reducing greenhouse gases.
Certified Wood Products
Although wood offers a number of environmental advantages, not all wood products are the same when it comes to green. Wood certified by accredited third parties provides the assurance that it was grown and harvested in environmentally responsible ways.
The U.S. Forest Service defines certification as "a non-regulatory alternative that offers a stamp of approval for forest management practices considered to be environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable." Certification is a voluntary process that goes beyond governmental requirements formanaging forests. Today there are more than 50 forest certification programs worldwide.
In the U.S., most certified wood products fall under one of two prominent forest certification programs: the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Both the SFI and FSC certification programs share a number of common traits, although they approach specific sustainable forest certification components in different ways.
Both programs are independently governed and are internationally recognized and accepted, and participants in each program are subject to third-party certification. The programs include measures to protect water quality, soils and wildlife as well as exceptionally rare or endangered forests, and they both call for prompt replanting to ensure forest availability for future generations.
A third certification program U.S. buildersmay encounter is theAmerican Tree Farm System (ATFS). This program is intended for smaller, familyowned forests. Although not as widely recognized as SFI and FSC, it is important because two-thirds of the commercial forestland in the U.S. is owned by millions of family forest owners.
Extending good practices to smaller tree farms is a high priority for certification systems worldwide. This is especially true for SFI,which is the only program that has a certified procurement system designed to improve and promote sustainable forest practices employed by small family forestland owners who provide raw material to certified manufacturing facilities.
For wood products imported from Canada, builders may also hear of the Sustainable Forest Management standard from the Canadian Standards Association (CSA). The CSA program is well designed to work with the large presence of government owned land and public involvement processes used in Canada.
It is not necessary for builders to understand every detail of wood product certification programs in depth. The important factor is to choose materials that are certified by a trustworthy, third-party source. The SFI, FSC, ATFS and CSA standards are all credible certification programs with support from a range of conservation groups, forest owners, universities, scientists and governmental agencies. Recognizing all credible, third-party forest certification programs is important considering that only 10 percent of the world's forests are certified-more than half of which are in North America.
Certification and Green Building Rating Programs
A number of organizations offer builders ratings on the overall green aspects of their homes. Wood structural framing, especially from certified sources, can help earn rating points under these programs.
There are upward of 60 ormore green building rating programs in the U.S. They range from those developed by local and regional governments to nationwide programs initiated by trade associations and nonprofit groups.
The two programs most builders are familiar with are NAHB's National Green Building Program-based on the National Green Building Standard-and the U.S. Green Building Council's residential Green Building Rating System-LEED for Homes. Wood products can earn points under both systems. Consult the program sponsors for details.
When selecting among brands of wood framing materials, check for a certification label, or ask the dealer for more information about certified products. The manufacturer can also provide details on the certification programs in which they participate.
David Helmers is the manager of structural frame marketing for iLevel