Contact Gains FSC Certification

Contact Industries recently was awarded Forest Stewardship Council Chain-of-Custody certification, after completing an accreditation process. The Portland, Ore.-based company says it expects its new certification to help validate the resource efficient practices it has been using for many years.

Earlier in 2007, Peter McKibbin, the company’s vice president, explained Contact’s “commonsense” approach to green marketing and said its customers could easily put two-and-two together regarding the green aspect of extending wood resources (see Shelter’s September 2007 edition). But now its customers can have the added security of an FSC label.

McKibbin says the decision to seek certification was partly in response to customer requests for products that qualify for credits under the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED green building certification programs.

“But the larger impetus was the desire to further validate what we already knew was an environmentally responsible manufacturing process we actually began in 1985,” McKibbin explains.

Contact says its profile-wrapping process allows the organization to extend hardwood resources up to 50 times when compared to conventional solid wood millwork. Veneer slicing technology allows it to get as many as 50 identical veneered products from a blank of wood that would produce one product using conventional methods. The company says it has long offered customers the option of using FSC- and SFI certified substrates and veneers, but now those products can retain their certified status as they enter the end-use marketplace.

“With a relatively new emphasis on the commercial construction market for our products, I expect this certification will give us a foothold in a number of projects seeking LEED certification which we previously had a difficult time breaking into,” McKibbin says.

Auditing for the FSC chain of custody certification was conducting through the auspices of Scientific Certification Systems, an independent, third-party auditing organization based in Oakland, Calif.

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