Certified Supply
It’s important for dealers and distributors to know the key differences between SFI and FSC in terms of certified wood availability and demand. FSC focuses on policing the world’s forests, while SFI concentrates on timberlands that supply mills and the LBM supply channel in North America. While FSC has certified more forest acreage worldwide, SFI’s domestic timber industry roots have resulted in that group certifying roughly 90% of the continent’s industrial forestland, or more than half of the U.S. lumber supply.
“Dealers and others looking at certified wood will see a lot of SFI material in dimensions and the volume they need,” says Roger Rutan, vice president of Timber Products Co. in Springfield, Ore., which operates nine timber-manufacturing facilities, some of which are certified by both SFI and FSC, and manages 118,000 acres of SFI-certified forestland in Northern California. “Fewer lands and mills in North America are FSC-certified, which affects the volume of that material.”
That disconnect puts suppliers with an FSC chain-of-command certificate in a difficult spot. “What I can sell [of FSC-certified material], I can’t get, and what I can get, I can’t sell,” says Roy Cobble, general manager of Adobe Lumber in American Canyon, Calif. No. 2 grade FSC-certified lumber, for instance, is fairly available, he says, but green-building programs and architects and builders adhering to them often require or request No. 1 grade, kiln-dried lumber, a more difficult spec to deliver.
Boise Building Materials is in a similar spot. Among 30-plus lumber suppliers that ship product to the facility, only three are certified to sell FSC lumber. The availability of FSC-certified material “gets even narrower when you request specific timber species and dimensions,” says Slater. “You have to get a mix of product from different suppliers [to satisfy an order], so there’s no volume price break from any of them.”
FSC’s response to this supply-chain disconnect is mostly wait and see. “Demand will drive supply,” says Katie Miller, communications director for FSC in Washington. “If demand is there, it’ll work backward to getting more forests and mills FSC-certified.”
Demand Drivers
Consumers aren’t the only force creating demand. Boise Building Materials, for instance, maintains a valid certificate because its primary upstream supplier, Potlatch Forest Products, requested it. “Potlatch wanted me to carry the certificate because it was making a large investment in getting its mills certified for FSC and SFI,” says Slater.
Meanwhile, the distributor’s largest downstream customer, Boulder Lumber in Boulder, Colo., was under pressure from its contractor customers to supply certified wood to meet the FSC-only standards of the city’s mandated green-building program, and itself earned an FSC chain-of-custody certificate to enable that business–meaning it could only buy the material from suppliers that have a chain-of-custody certificate. If Boise Building Materials declined the dealer’s request to stock and sell FSC lumber, Slater says, he likely would have sacrificed all of Builder Lumber’s business. “Exclusive of the other business I do with Boulder Lumber, it doesn’t make good business sense” to sell FSC-certified lumber, he says.
Demand for SFI-certified lumber could rise faster than FSC as local, state, regional, and national green-building rating systems and programs spread. There are more than 100 programs in development, and most let builders meet the certified wood standard with either FSC or SFI-certified material.
Because of supply chain agreements with major domestic mills and upstream LBM suppliers that support SFI, many dealers carry that material, if not a chain-of-custody certificate. “Most dealers I work with know they have SFI stock,” says Jason Metrick, SFI’s director of market access and products labeling. “They just need a certificate to market and sell it as such.”
In spite of SFI’s decision to require chain-of-custody certificates of all legal owners along the LBM supply chain, the cost and record-keeping to gain and maintain that status is a much easier pill to swallow than with FSC.
“If we relied on FSC sales only, we’d be out of business a long time ago,” says Cobble. “The attention it’s getting from all the media about green building isn’t translating to the real world of sales.”–Rich Binsacca is a contributing editor to ProSales.
