nice article from the Globe & Mail Sat. Aug 12th.
It does not mention AQCI but I think it tells us, we are where the future is going!
Good wood
While tropical hardwoods have become a hot décor item,
they also remain a hot-button issue for environmentalists.
As more and more consumers try to do
the right thing, retailers are taking action.
KAREN BURSHTEIN
Special to The Globe and Mail
Saturday, August 12, 2000
Your back yard is looking lush. You've invited your friends for a
barbecue on your new tumbled-stone patio. But instead of leaning back
to enjoy the view, they want to know where the teak in your loungers
came from. And hey, what about the wooden tray on the grill?
A rainforest, right? Not exactly. If your tropical-hardwood furniture is
made of "ethical" wood, it was likely grown on a plantation, or a
secondary forest certified by a watchdog like the international Forest
Stewardship Council.
"Good wood" is the new buzz term in furniture. And it isn't just for
eco-activists any more: Home décor retailers such as Ikea and
Restoration Hardware are jumping on the good-wood bandwagon,
along with hardware giants such as Home Depot. It's a trend, industry
insiders say, driven by consumers.
"We found that more and more, our customers were asking for certified
furniture," said Laurence Martoque, a spokeswoman for Ikea Canada,
whose parent company plans to phase out all products made from wood
of unknown origin by next month. "Wood is a good resource to use
when used responsibly. But only when used in a sustainable, proper
manner. We don't purchase remotely. We know the suppliers we work
with."
The Swedish-based chain is following in the footsteps of Home Depot,
which pledged last year to stop buying wood products from
"environmentally sensitive areas" by the end of 2002. And just this week,
Home Depot's main U.S. competitor, Lowe's Cos., announced it would
immediately end purchases of lumber from endangered forests, including
the Great Bear Rainforest on the B.C. coast, a move denounced by the
Canadian forest industry.
For some, this eco-awareness is happening none too soon, given the
renewed consumer hunger for wood.
"Wood is in," said Meg Crossley, design editor at Canadian House and
Home magazine. "Lamp bases, vases, storage units are all wood. Whole
walls are wood, which we haven't seen since the Sixties, and if the wood
has a hint of the exotic, it's even more appealing."
The debate over wood, which has long been simmering in rainforests
around the world, has heated up in recent months. In May, Nature
magazine reported that Caribbean and Pacific mahoganies are all but
extinct, despite the "mahogany is murder" boycott of the 1990s. Illegal
logging in Cambodia runs rampant, especially since neighbouring
Thailand banned hardwood logging in 1989. Burmese teak, frequently
smuggled out of Myanmar, and satinwood are also on the brink of
extinction, according to CITES, the Convention on International Trade
in Endangered Species. And just last month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
lawyer for the Washington, D.C.-based National Resource Defense
Council, flew into Canada to publicize the fight over Great Bear.
"Canadians are saying boo hoo about decimation of the Brazilian and
other tropical rainforests," said Christoph Thies, a spokesman for
Greenpeace, a partner in Ikea's good-wood program. "But too few
realize that the B.C rainforest, the last temperate rainforest on the
planet, is just about extinct."
Thies says Ikea is sending an important message out to consumers --
and to its competitors. "People who buy wood have a right, actually an
obligation, to know where the wood comes from, to know that they are
doing their part in preventing ancient forest destruction."
The need for awareness is echoed by Peterborough, Ont.-based
furniture designer Michael Fortune, a 1993 winner of the Saidye
Bronfman award for craft. "It is important to have information available
to furniture designers and architects," Fortune said, "so that office towers
and interiors do not go up that consume huge amounts of enviromentally
fragile wood, only to be redecorated in five years."
Fortune has put his principles into action, helping set up a program in
Trinidad and Tobago that builds outdoor furniture for export out of teak
and a mahogany-like wood from plantations. He worked on a similar
program in Mexico, aimed at promoting a sustainable timber industry,
and is setting up a woodworking shop in B.C.'s Queen Charlotte
Islands.
But even motivated consumers have trouble sorting out the issues.
Conservation groups have become as thick as the trees in a rainforest,
and many disagree on basic issues such as whether it is ever acceptable
to cut down old-growth trees.
Most would find plantation wood acceptable, however, which is why
you will see the words "plantation-grown teak" in the catalogue of
retro-chic emporium Restoration Hardware. Toronto's Craig Osborne,
part-owner of Tribal Trade, purveyor of sleek teak chaises and other
tropical-wood furniture, also offers plantation teak, grown in Indonesia
and monitored by a group called Forests Forever. "The Indonesian
government has actively been monitoring their teak-forest plantations for
50 years," Osborne said.
Promoting the use of responsibly "managed" wood is a more pragmatic
approach than chaining yourself to railroad tracks, as environmentalists
did in Switzerland this spring to halt a shipment of African wood. And
boycotts, while they get attention, can be risky. "Boycotts are
unpredictable," said Norman Bezona, professor emeritus at the
University of Hawaii College of Tropical Agriculture and Human
Resources. Rather than saving endangered trees, he said, a boycott can
lead to them being cut down in order to grow species that are seen as
more consumer-friendly.
While eco-consciousness is on the rise, Canadian consumers are a long
way from being as demanding as Europeans. Syd Barkhouse, an
engineer at the Fiesta Barbecue company in Mississauga, Ont., said his
company uses Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood for the
shelves and handles of grills destined for overseas. But the company gets
few requests for certified wood components from North Americans.
"The European market is more evolved in terms of that," he said.
The awareness lag is partly why there are still only a handful of
FSC-certified forests in Canada. The certification process can be
lengthy, requiring adherence to a 10-point program, which includes
avoiding old-growth cutting and obtaining the informed consent of
indigenous groups to log. Chain-of-custody rules mean FSC wood can't
even be stored with other wood.
Such restrictions, which have raised the ire of traditional lumber
suppliers, also raise costs, whether the wood is being harvested in North
America or Thailand. That means smaller retailers and manufacturers
who lack the clout of an Ikea have to simply trust their suppliers.
"A lot of our customers ask us the provenance of the wood," said Gary
Grossman, owner of Biltmore, which has furniture boutiques in Montreal
and Toronto. "We've been told that it is plantation teak.
"I've been to Indonesia and you're shown a sample of the wood and
you're told that's where it comes from. But it would be pretty well
impossible to know where the tree was really cut down."
Terry Iwaskiw, owner of Upcountry in Toronto, echoes that sentiment.
"I know a lot of people who are essentially buying wood off the back of
trucks, high-end manufacturers buying from any source they can get," he
said.
"I would like to think we're being responsible, but in the end we rely on
the integrity of our source."
WOOD WORDS
The issues involved in sustainable wood management are labyrinthine
and fraught with politics, but an hour or two on the Internet will provide
fodder for thought. Some sites are listed below.
certifiedwood.org: The Certified Forest Products Council
gives detailed information on wood species, certified wood products and
sources.
fscoax.org: The Mexico-based Forest Stewardship Council
site provides a list of FSC certified forests, including several in Canada.
It also outlines what consumers and suppliers can do to ensure they are
buying good wood.
greenpeace.org: The environmental organization's site
provides an introduction to secondary-forest growth.
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