Manufacturers are looking everywhere for information that will help them squeeze out a profit margin. With the cost of raw materials continuing to creep up higher and higher, they need to be informed on the different factors that may be causing the price of materials to rise. A better-informed buyer is a more profitable manufacturer. With that in mind, this month’s Modern Woodworking debuts a quarterly feature called “Material Issues.” This department will track trends in raw materials — everything from pricing to buying tips, yield increasing applications, import trends and the effects of certification issues.

The latter is the subject of our first column. Friends in the industry tell me there needs to be more information provided about forest and wood product certification issues. Retail and consumer demand is forcing manufacturers to take a hard look at producing product that is considered “Green.” In fact, giants like Home Depot and Lowes say that within a few years, they only will offer their customers wood products that originate from certified sources.

In this month’s issue, we thought it would be a good idea to define “Certification” and inform manufacturers what it means to them. Simple enough, right? Wrong. What I found out was that “Green” certification is complicated. First of all, there is more than one organization out there that provides guidelines and standards that must be met in order for a product to be considered certified. So, as a manufacturer, do you need a source that is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) or the American Forest & Paper Association’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI)? Or do you need both?

The FSC says that it is the organization that matters and will not recognize the certification procedures of the SFI. The SFI counters that its rules are just as good as the FSC’s rules. Usually, competition is healthy. In this situation, however, this is not the case.

On top of that, there are two claims that can be made for a product to be certified. A product can come from a source that is managed, and therefore be certified, or the product can come from recovered and recycled wood fiber, and it can be considered certified. At the moment, there seems to be no demand for one over the other. The products just need a stamp that says one of the entities charged with monitoring established guidelines has OK’d the material.

Finally, there seems to be confusion as to whether or not a product that might have begun as a log in a well-managed forest is still considered certified once a laminate or outsourced component is added.

You can see how it gets confusing. The situation is worse than boxing, where there are numerous governing bodies all claiming that their champ is the real deal. Whether you are talking about the WBC, WBA, IBF or the FSC, SFI, and AF&PA, the situation is screaming for standardization. Maybe the solution is to gather together the officials from the SFI and the FSC and put them in a ring. The winner of the bout gets to impose its standards and regulations on the certification process.

At the root of the problem is one organization’s reluctance to accept the other. Until there is some kind of merging, or one of the organizations lets the other be the standard for “Green” certification, there will continue to be questions and uncertainty. The further down the current path we go, the more entangled the situation becomes. Before you know it, Home Depot may recognize only one organization’s certified products, while Target may only recognize the other.

David Welch
Phone: 800-633-5953
Fax: 205-391-2081
e-mail: dwelch@randallpub.com