Finding Certified Wood Online: www.certifiedwood.org

Certification Resource Center by the

Certified Forest Products Council

www.certifiedwood.org

ForestWorld

www.forestworld.com

The Certified Forest Products Council (CFPC) is a nonprofit organization working to increase awareness of, and develop markets for, products from environmentally sound forest operations. Although not officially affiliated with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), CFPC is a strong advocate of FSC-accredited certification as the only system that lives up to the Council’s own standards. (An aside: the Certified Forest Products International Conference & Showcase, originally scheduled for September 26–28, 2001, has been rescheduled for April 25–27, 2002 at the Cobb Galleria in Atlanta). Now there is an online resource that explains this endorsement in detail, while also providing great new tools for finding and specifying certified wood and other forest products.

The Certification Resource Center offers clear, well-organized background materials on forest product certification in general. Its main feature, however, is a series of databases that are tied directly to the FSC’s official listings of certified organizations. Every current holder of an FSC certificate is listed, either in the directory of Certified Forests or in the directory of Certified Products, which lists suppliers holding the “chain-of-custody” certification that is required to ensure that anything sold as certified wood was actually harvested as such.

A similar online database is among the many resources offered at ForestWorld, a privately held company in Middlebury, Vermont that produces, along with this Web site, the

Woods of the World CD-ROM. (See

EBN

Vol. 5, No. 2 for a review of version 2.0 of this product. A Web version is now available as well, and version 3.0 of the CD-ROM is due out soon.) In the past, ForestWorld’s online database had listed wood products certified to a number of different standards, but it now focuses on FSC-certified forests and products.

The completeness of these databases is both a boon and a flaw for potential users of the products, however, because not every holder of an FSC certificate is actively producing or supplying product. ForestWorld also offers consulting and brokering services to link buyers and sellers of certified wood to save the time that could be spent chasing down suppliers (the supplier pays a finder’s fee).

One weakness of both database services is that they are organized around FSC certificates, so companies with multiple certificates are listed more than once, and there is no indication in one listing that others exist. Nevertheless, these databases represent an exciting new breakthrough in terms of access to certified wood products, and, as they evolve further, should become a real force in the growth of this market.

– NM