FSC Certification

All of our factories are FSC certified by the Forest Stewardship Council in order to provide you with most responsibly harvested lumber products available. FSC® works to promote responsible forest management worldwide. The complete process from the approval of the forest management plan, to how wood is selected for cutting, harvested, processed, and to how it gets shipped to your job site is carefully monitored. When the FSC® label is attached to a wood product it provides the most credible link between responsible production and consumption. Using FSC certified material can also be utilized to achieve LEED points from the United States Green Building Council. Whether you are trying to gain a LEED credit (e.g. MRc7 and MRc5) for your green building project, or you just want to build an eco-friendly project, we can supply you FSC® certified wood, from the strongest FSC® certified decking boards to rough FSC®certified lumber.

Some important facts about our FSC material:

FSC forest projects include social efforts for cities, towns and indigenous communities surrounding the forest management area. Social efforts include employing local populations, building/supporting schools, hospitals, and other community aid organizations.FSC mandates a skidding plan for logs so that the log paths out of the forest are not overutilized. This allows for forest undergrowth to regrow rapidly. Road planning, protection of endangered trees during skidding/felling, log volume discrepancies are all monitored by the FSC. Naturally fallen trees are also harvested in order to maximize usable material that the forest regenerates.

A typical FSC certified forest area is authorized for a 30 year cutting plan. The area is divided into 30 areas, with one area selectively cut thinned each year. Only a few trees per hectare are harvested so that the forest is truly a renewable resource for generations to come. A maximum of 25 cubic meters of logs per hectare are harvested in the FSC concession. Normal government controlled forest management plans allow up to 30 cubic meters of logs per hectare to be extracted. An average tree is about 7 M3. A large tree can provide all 25 M3, thus only one tree per hectare would be extracted. After 25 years the FSC management plan allows for the original area to be selectively harvested again. At that point there is more timber growing on the original cutting area and the forest is more healthy as younger seed-bearing trees have been allowed to flourish. FSC forest areas maintain buffer zones of virgin areas, keeping forestry practices away from rivers and special animal habitat. The animal population is monitored and counted both before and after extraction in order to ensure healthy population levels. Unlike typical forest management areas, hunting is not allowed in FSC forest areas.FSC certification of a forest area also requires that the employees receive adequate living accommodations, proper meals, classroom training and procedure training. A DDS (Daily Dialog of Safety) is also mandated in order to keep worker safety a top priority.

At the logging camp and at our mill FSC requires that we engage in rigorous recycling.

Waste from our existence is recycled in various ways.

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