Suppliers urged to do the right thing - Brief Article

Home Channel News, June 5, 2000 by Carol Tice

New wood-purchasing policies leave millwork vendors wondering how they will be affected

The decision by several leading retailers and home builders to alter their wood-purchasing policies in favor of environmentally safer products has mill- work suppliers wondering aloud how these policies will be implemented, and what impact these decisions will have on what is sold and used for home building, remodeling and repair projects.

"I think it just really challenges everyone to look at their programs," said Jennifer DeBoef, a spokeswoman for Iowa-based Pella, one of the industry's leading window and door makers. She noted that Pella primarily uses white pine, a non-endangered species, in the manufacture of its millwork. "We feel were already doing the right thing [environmentally]," she said.

Doing the right thing is what more customers are demanding of suppliers of wood-derived products, and their ranks are growing. Over the past two months, two leading home builders -- Los Angeles-based Kaufman & Broad, and Dallas-based Centex Homes -- and the 190-unit Lanoga, the industry's 11thlargest retailer, have stated their intention to either drastically reduce or eliminate entirely their sale or use of products made from wood harvested from endangered forests, Ellis Goebel, a senior vp for Building Material Holding Corp., said the homebuilders' announcements have motivated his company -- the parent of BMC West, the industry's 14th-largest retailer -- to step up its efforts to find a way to assure customers as to the origins of the wood products its yards sell.

The eco-decisions by these companies follow similar declarations by leading dealers -- including Home Depot, Wickes, HomeBase and Menard -- of their intent to give preference to wood coming from forests whose management has been certified as complying with specific ecological criteria. Lowe's is also said to be close to making an announcement about its wood-purchasing policies.

For a company like Lanoga, the Washington-based pro dealer that counts Centex and Kaufman & Broad among its customers, this issue is becoming complex. Mike Morehouse, Lanoga's COO, told NHCN that his company is beginning its process by identifying customers that will be requesting certified wood products. Then Lanoga will work with vendors to fill those needs. However, the problem is supply; certified lumber represents only 1 percent of what's available on the market today. "I don't know if in three years, that'll be different," said Morehouse.

Certification battlefield

Nevertheless, this genie is Out of the bottle, and there appears to be no way of putting it back in.

Consequently, Andersen, the window supplier with perhaps the highest top-of-mind awareness among homeowners, recently joined the Certified Forest Products Council, an organization co-founded by Home Depot to help clarify forest management and "chain of custody" issues. "We are working with suppliers to ensure that specified lumber or cut stock is not sourced from old-growth rainforests in British Columbia," said Libby Johnston, a spokeswoman for Andersen who is a member of the team working on the company's Forest Resources Initiative.

A spokesperson for Jeld-Wen, another leading millwork supplier that's based in Klamath Falls, Ore., said her company would announce its own environmental policy imminently.

The Rainforest Action Network, which advocates a complete halt to cutting down old-growth timber, is putting pressure on several other companies in the home building and improvement arena, including 84 Lumber and Lennar, the home builder that recently merged with U.S. Homes to form the largest homebuilding company in the United States.

However, the real battlefield is likely to be over which certification scheme gains the widest acceptance. RAN is firmly behind third-party certification as carried out under specifications established by the Forest Stewardship Council, which Lanoga is currently looking into. Jennifer Krill, a spokeswoman for RAN, said her organization was committed to helping companies comply with FSC's guidelines.

However, Centex is one of many American-based companies that lean toward a broader interpretation of certification which would embrace other schemes such as the industry-devised Sustainable Forestry Initiative and the International Standards Organization (ISO) 14001 EMS Program.

Centex spokesman Kevin McKeever said that at this point his company is focusing primarily on species such as mahogany and lauan, which are used for everything from doors to decks, but are known to come from environmentally sensitive regions. An audit conducted to learn the extent to which Centex is using the woods showed they are not much used now, with the exception of Douglas fir. McKeever said Centex is now investigating alternative species that could be substituted.

"It's not going to be an overnight process," McKeever said.