I was contacted this week by the architect of a home owner who is building a house. The architect wanted my opinion on a Malaysian source of meranti, and why he thought it unwise to use a local carpenter to make windows and doors from recycled oregan pine wood. This was my response…
I am afraid this is not good enough. Malaysia’s reputation is not good. I found it interesting that the Interwil brochure talks about sourcing wood from “countries” with good forest management. This is a nice sleight of hand. They would know full well that there is only one guarantee and that is a Forest Stewardship Certification which is actually very easy to get even for rather suspect plantations. The fact that they do not even mention it and they cover up with a meaningless obfuscation that is designed to fool ignorant consumers makes it even more worrying. But you can test my suspicions and write to Interwill and say how happy you are that they provide sustainable meranti, could they just email you a scanned copy of the Forest Stewardship Certificate. If you don’t get it for whatever reason, then you can assume that your are asking your client and the Lynedoch EcoVillage to participate in the genocidal destruction of the only natural assets in the world that may help prevent warming by another two degrees which Sir Nicholas Stern (former Chief Economists of the World Bank) in his report to PM Gordon Brown said will result in the suffering and death of literally hundreds of millions of people – as he put it the “poor will suffer first and most” even though “they have contribute least to the problem”. The ethics at work here are obvious. But maybe you will get the certificate from Interwil so that we can believe we are part of the solution, maybe…
On recycled oregan pine, you should first consult with people who have done this before jumping to conclusions. My entire house has windows and doors made from recycled pine made by a local company who made them to specs set by the architect. We have had absolutely no problems. (One more thing: when designing houses for people who want ecologically designed houses, you must assume they have an appetite for greater risk than normal buyers otherwise they would not be choosing to live in an EcoVillage which is, by definition, an experiment to create the knowledge base and technologies for how the rest of the world will be living in 50 years from now.)