Sustainable Forest Industry

I read with particular interest the article entitled “Alternative Forestry Certifications Challenge the FSC” in your January issue of

Environmental Building News (EBN

Vol. 9, No. 1), and I would like to clarify some items related to the American Forest & Paper Association’s (AF&PA) Sustainable Forestry Initiative^SM (SFI) program.

program. Like all progressive innovations, the SFI program is evolving. Our goal is to make the SFI program the recognized standard for sustainable forestry in the U.S.

• The SFI program verification indicators are both systems-based and performance-based. They are intended to provide guidance for any organization regardless of size or location. Each organization needs to interpret and structure the indicators to fit its specific circumstances. This is reasonable and practical and reflects our interest in recognizing regional and ownership differences. In no way does this detract from the spirit or intent of the program.

• The sampling is not dictated by the company being verified. Throughout any verification process, especially on large ownerships, verifiers need to apply sampling tech-niques which will result in an unbiased look at an organization’s forests and practices.

• We will continue to improve our verification process to facilitate consistency and program credibility. With a common framework for establishing broadly applicable verification indicators, AF&PA will be better able to promote the goals of sustainable forestry and continual improvement of forestry practices.

Michael Virga, Director

Sustainable Forestry Programs

American Forest & Paper Association

Washington, D.C.

Editors’ response:

We regret our error regarding the sampling process used in SFI’s voluntary third-party audits. While we applaud AF&PA for recognizing the importance of responsible forestry,

EBN continues to support the more stringent standards and verification represented by Forest Stewardship Council-based certification. Only FSC-based certification qualifies wood products for inclusion in our GreenSpec directory. (For more on forest certification, see State Forests in Northeast Gaining Certification.)