Home Improvement Caddy: How to Buy Green Furniture and Other ...

Furniture, timber & other wooden things

Wood is a natural, renewable, recyclable, biodegradable and non-toxic material. It's more energy-efficient to produce than metal and most other materials and, in theory, if trees are planted in greater numbers than they're cut down, the timber industry can even help reduce global warming by soaking up CO2. But some of the wood we buy comes with serious environmental and social costs. Every year, millions of acres of ecologically precious tropical rainforest is lost. Urbanization and the clearing of farmland for cattle feed and palm oil are probably the biggest drivers of this destruction, but the harvesting of valuable woods - such as mahogany and teak - is still a major contributor to the problem. Such woods are used in everything from salad bowls and garden furniture to musical instruments.

Deforestation is a key source of climate change. It's an enormous threat to biodiversity, too: more than half the world's species are thought to inhabit the three remaining large tropical forests, in the Amazon and Congo basins and the island nations of South-East Asia. The loss of forest also alters local climates, causes soil erosion and in many cases is associated with serious social problems. Many forest-based people have contracted diseases from loggers or been aggressively forced off their indigenous lands - or even killed when they've refused to leave.

The UK imports around four-fifths of its wood and when it comes to rainforest varieties such as mahogany, a large proportion of these imports have been illegally sourced - that is, cut down or exported in a way that breaks the laws of the country it came from. There are no definitive figures, but Friends of the Earth and other groups have estimated that more than half of the UK's tropical wood imports have been illegally sourced, with much of the rest being legal but not from sustainably man?aged forests. The timber industry disputes such claims, yet cases keep popping up which suggest that even wood specialists with ethical policies and big budgets are failing to keep their noses clean (as the Royal Family discovered when the Queen's Gallery was inadvertently refurbished with wood from endangered forests in Cameroon).

Good wood

The best way to be sure that your wood has come from sustainably managed forests is to choose products bearing the logo of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). There are various sustainable wood labelling schemes out there. But many of them - such as the American Sustainable Forestry Initiative - are run by the timber industry and lack the credibility of the FSC.

An international, independent, non-profit-making organization, the FSC was founded in 1993 after extensive consultation between "timber users, traders and representatives of environmental and human-rights organizations". It only accredits wood when it can vouch for the entire supply chain - or chain of custody - from forest to sawmill to proces?sor. The scheme has been criticized from time to time (in late 2002 the Rainforest Foundation accused the FSC of "knowingly misleading the public") but the vast majority of environmental groups fully support the organization and its labeling scheme.

Reclaimed wood

FSC-certified wood is a good choice, but environmentalists claim the very greenest option is to favor reclaimed (recycled) timber whenever possible. After all, for all its recyclable credentials, wood accounts for a significant proportion of our waste: Friends of the Earth has estimated that 3000 tons of perfectly good wood are thrown away or burnt each day just from buildings being demolished in the UK. And yet reclaimed wood is often better quality than new stuff, as it contains less water, is less likely to contract and was usually harvested before the advent of quick-growth forests, which are better at producing wood quickly than they are at delivering really fine timber.

The Reclaimed Building Supply website will help you find local suppli?ers of reclaimed timber and other products. Also check out Salvo, which has classifieds for everything from reclaimed floorboards to antique staircases, and the relevant page of the WasteBook site.

New, uncertified wood

If buying FSC-certified or reclaimed wood isn't an option, at the very least try to avoid tropical or semitropical hardwood such as mahogany, teak, redwood, rosewood, ebony and iroko (an increasingly popular choice for high-end kitchen worktops). Such products won't necessarily have been logged from virgin rainforests, but it's not unlikely. Also try to avoid suppliers that can't tell you about the origins of their woods.

Source: http://www.homeimprovementcaddy.com/2012/11/how-to-buy-green-furniture-and-other.html

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