Consumers Creating Market for Sustainable Wood Products

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What's a Good Wood?
Bamboo, Reclaimed Materials Let Floors Be Polished but Green

By Barbara Ruben
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, March 20, 2004; Page F01

Inga Erickson's century-old wide-plank heart pine floor gleams in her Vienna
Craftsman-style house. But Erickson's home itself is hardly historic. In
fact, she's moving into the newly constructed house later this month.

But the amber-colored flooring and some of the beams in the house were
reclaimed from the demolition of an old textile mill in South Carolina. In
fact, the longleaf heart pine now underfoot was likely towering in a
southeastern forest during the Revolutionary War.

Erickson said she chose older wood both because it will bring a sense of
history to her home and because no new trees were felled to provide her
floors.

"We really find the closer to nature we can get ourselves, the happier we
are," she said.

Like Erickson, a growing number of consumers, builders and architects are
turning to a variety of more environmentally conscious wood flooring choices
rather than choosing recently milled oak or maple. Some look to fast-growing
bamboo harvested from Southeast Asia or to tiles of cork, made from the bark
of oak trees in the Mediterranean. Another green option is wood that has
been cut from forests managed sustainably. This is wood that has been
certified by the U.S. Forest Stewardship Council, a Washington-based
nonprofit group backed by industry and environmental organizations and
affiliated with a similar international organization.

"Buying these kinds of woods is kind of like buying organic food. The floor
you're buying is good for the earth, looks great in your house and makes you
feel good, too," said Cael Kendall, marketing director for EcoTimber, a
California-based company that was established 12 years ago and claims to be
the nation's first environmental lumber company.

EcoTimber sells bamboo flooring, reclaimed wood and certified wood. "We're
booming. Overall, people are looking for healthier, more sustainable
products," said Kendall, whose company sells wood flooring across the
country and is considering opening an East Coast office.

Expect a wide range of prices for these woods, depending on quality and
manufacturing process. For example, a Web search of cork flooring sources
showed a range of prices from $4 to $20 per square foot. Bamboo has a
narrower range of prices, generally $4 to $7 square foot. Expect to pay a
premium for reclaimed lumber; for one thing, old nails are painstakingly
removed by hand.

Here is more detail on some of the most popular environmentally sensitive
flooring options.
Bamboo

A cousin to the green stalks of bamboo that pandas like to munch, bamboo
harvested for timber grows on vast plantations in China, Vietnam and other
Asian countries. Unlike forest trees that take decades to regenerate,
fast-growing bamboo is ready to harvest in four to six years. That speedy
growth generally requires few pesticides or fertilizers.

Although it has been installed in homes in the United States since just the
early 1990s, bamboo has been used in construction in Asia for thousands of
years.

The hollow reeds of bamboo are cut into strips, boiled to remove the starch
and then dried. They are then laminated into solid boards. The planks are a
smooth, light color; they can be stained darker.

"Bamboo is technically a grass, although its pore structure is the same as
wood, and is in fact more durable than many hardwoods," said Ed Korczak,
executive director of the National Wood Flooring Association. "It's a good
choice for people who like a nice, light, neutral color wood, like ash or
maple."

Kendall, with EcoTimber, cautions that a proliferation of bamboo flooring
companies has bamboozled some customers. Don't necessarily go with the
cheapest product, he said.

Some companies may use immature stalks of bamboo or not dry the stalks
completely. Others use glues that may contain formaldehyde that can
"off-gas" into homes. Poorly dried bamboo can warp when exposed to changes
in temperature, he said. Kendall suggests checking references for companies
before buying from them.
Cork

Cork oak is the only tree that can regenerate itself after each harvest.
About two-thirds of the tree's bark is stripped off the tree, which is found
primarily in Spain, Portugal and North Africa. Harvesters leave a thin layer
of protective inner bark on the tree, and the outer bark regenerates itself.

"It's almost like shearing a sheep. I really like the fact that it doesn't
harm the tree," said Gaithersburg architect Robyn Renas, who has chosen cork
floors for some of the houses she has designed. She also uses bamboo and
reclaimed lumber.

After it is stripped from trees, the cork is ground up, mixed with glue and
baked. As it is exposed to heat, the cork darkens. It can be any shade from
light tan to darker brown. The ground-up pieces of cork give the floor a
kind of mottled effect.

Unlike the soft cork used for bulletin boards and bottle stoppers, the cork
for flooring is compressed to make it harder. It is finished with up to five
coats of acrylic and sometimes an additional layer of polyurethane. Cork is
sold in square tiles.

Still, with 200 million tiny air cells per cubic inch, cork is cushier than
hardwood flooring. That can make it a good choice for kitchens and other
areas where people stand for long periods of time.

"It's very resilient underfoot. People who have bad backs or stand a lot
like cork," said Ann Wicander, president of WE Cork Inc., a cork flooring
company in Exeter, N.H., that has been in her family for five generations.

Wicander routinely tells the story of a man who accidentally dropped a plate
from his family's china collection in the kitchen, only to have it bounce --
unbroken -- on a cork floor her company installed. Cork, she said, is also a
good choice for libraries, museums and hospitals because it absorbs sound.

Cork has a much longer history in the United States than bamboo. It was
first used in flooring here in the early years of the last century. "Once in
a while we get calls from churches -- 1917 is the earliest, I think -- that
they need new tiles or refinishing," Wicander said.
Palm

Palm is one of the most recent environmentally sound wood choices to come on
the market, according to Korczak of the National Wood Flooring Association.
Coconut palm trees on plantations produce coconuts for 40 to 80 years before
becoming dormant.

Once they can no longer be harvested for their coconuts, they are cut down
and new ones are grown. Environmentalists view this as a sounder alternative
to cutting trees from rainforests.

"After the palm is taken down, the roots fertilize the soil," Korczak said.
"Palm is a dark wood, a beautiful wood, and very durable."
Reclaimed Lumber

Whether they are made of antique heart pine reclaimed from long-shuttered
textile mills or oak from vast brewing vats used by Guinness in Dublin a
century ago, floors of reclaimed lumber can serve as a time capsule. The
Mountain Lumber Co., located outside of Charlottesville, has found Civil War
bullets, coins, knife blades and handmade nails embedded in the wood it has
purchased from such places as the original John Deere factory, a Russian
train station and a Georgia pier build in the 1750s.

"Our tag line is 'where every floor has a story to tell,' " said Willie
Drake, who founded Mountain Lumber 27 years ago. "Buying a floor like this
is sort of as if the forest could talk. It becomes more than a floor to
people."

Each Mountain Lumber purchase is accompanied by a history of the lumber.
Much of the wood reclaimed from old buildings by Mountain Lumber originally
grew in the vast old-growth heart pine forests that covered millions of
acres from Virginia to Texas in the 1600s; today less than 1 percent of that
forest remains.

Chestnut was felled at a furious rate throughout the Appalachians as the
tree faced the chestnut blight of 1906 that killed off virtually all the
nation's chestnuts. Thus, most chestnut reclaimed comes from barns and homes
built in the early 1900s.

Because the wood is often from the behemoths of old-growth forests, milled
boards can be longer and wider than newly cut wood flooring.

Monica Neighbors used heart pine flooring from Mountain Lumber in the
upstairs of the Culpeper County home she bought two years ago. She had moved
from an older house in the city of Culpeper and wanted to impart a sense of
history to her newer home.

"There are nail holes and some big knots. It has a lot of character. It
looks so warm and old. It's absolutely gorgeous," Neighbors said.
Sustainably Grown Wood

Another source of eco-friendly wood is that which is certified to having
been grown using environmentally responsible forest management techniques.
The U.S. Forest Stewardship Council sets standards for certification. Wood
carrying this certification must be produced in a way that minimizes such
environmental impacts as road building and erosion, keeps pesticide use to a
minimum, protects species and promotes diversity within the forest.

"There are all kinds of costs associated with how forests are harvested,
loss of habitat, runoff into streams from erosion, et cetera," EcoTimber's
Kendall said. "With FSC-certified wood, there's a chain of custody, a paper
trail back to the forest where it's from, so you know just how the wood has
been grown."

Such environmental groups as Greenpeace, National Wildlife Federation,
Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund support and
encourage FSC certification.

Certified wood comes from more than 50 countries, including from Central and
South American tropical rainforests. One example is Brazilian cherry; this
wood features brown or black streaks that contrast to a reddish-brown
background. Other exotic woods that are being sold with certification
include Patagonian teak, tiete rosewood and white tigerwood.

For architect Renas, ecologically sound wood flooring is just one part of
creating a greener home. It's also a choice that she says clients are
increasingly requesting.

"Most of my clients are really proud of what they're up to in their homes,"
she said. "They want to have some sense of the story behind the materials in
it."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company