From Duluth News Tribune, by Janna Goerdt
A few bookkeeping changes could help secure the St. Louis County Land Department's future timber sales.
The department expects to be formally certified under the Sustainable Forestry Initiative and the International Organization for Standardization by mid-December, which Deputy Land Commissioner Mark Reed said should make the county's timber "more attractive" to big paper consumers.
Others, however, say the certification is often just superficial.
"A certification system is only as good as the forest practices it approves of," said Matt Norton of the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy.
"There are better systems out there" than SFI, he said.
Still, companies such as Home Depot and Time Inc. are calling for wood and paper products containing SFI-certified fiber.
"This is something that will help (St. Louis County) market their product," said David Refkin, Time's director of sustainable development.
Time publishes 135 magazines nationwide, and retailers such as L.L. Bean want their catalogs printed on SFI-certified paper, Refkin said.
St. Louis County manages about 900,000 acres of tax-forfeited forest. The Land Department earns money from timber, gravel and land sales -- $9.4 million in 2003, Reed said, with about two-thirds of that generated from timber sales.
The Land Department's certification was recently audited independently by the national Quality Management Institute.
Only a few on-the-ground changes should result from of- ficial certification, Reed said, including more consistent inspection and reporting at timber harvest sites.
"Even before the certification, we were managing sustainably," Reed said. "The benefit is that someone in an office in New York will now know that we are managed to this standard."
But some say the SFI label's main purpose is to reassure consumers.
"Forest certification is like organic certification, or cruelty-free labeling," said Kathryn Fernholz, a forester with Dovetail Partners Inc. of White Bear Lake, Minn. She was referring to labels that are often applied with little or no meaning behind them.
There are several different certification processes, Fernholz said, "and the primary concern about SFI is that it isn't very rigorous in terms of environmental standards."
Eleven broad objectives define an SFI-certified managed forest, including managing for wildlife habitat and water quality, and promoting efficient use of forest resources.
But "there are a number of problems with practices allowed by SFI," said Norton, a forest advocate and staff attorney with the St. Paul advocacy center.
Norton says that companies can still harvest old-growth timber under SFI standards, or replace diverse forests with "ecologically barren" single-species tree plantations, or even housing developments.
The SFI standard was also developed by an industry trade association, the American Forest and Paper Association, rather than an outside organization, Fernholz said.
Still, "I applaud St. Louis County for doing both certifications," Fernholz said. "The biggest thing it's showing is that land managers and the forest sector are responding to market demands."
Most of that demand is coming not from individual consumers, who may be reluctant to spend a few extra dollars for a certified 2-by-4, but from large companies.
Refkin said 80 percent of the fiber in the 650,000 tons of paper his company purchases annually is targeted to be from SFI-certified forests by the end of 2005.
Time buys paper from the Stora Enso Duluth Paper Mill and the Blandin Paper Mill in Grand Rapids.
St. Louis County forests "are the woodbasket for both those mills," Refkin said. "The county's certification will help move towards those targets."
Blandin owns and manages 195,000 acres of forest in northern Minnesota, all of which is also SFI-certified, said Joe Maher, senior vice president and general manager of Blandin Paper.
"It's important to us because our customers prefer it," Maher said, "and one of our corporate values is social and environmental responsibility."
Maintaining certification "guarantees that we walk the talk," Maher said.
As far as Reed knows, the county Land Department is the first public land agency to be both ISO and SFI certified in the country.
Having adopted the ISO 14001 Environmental Management System in tandem with SFI should also make the Land Department nimble enough to quickly respond to changes in market demand -- including a more rigorous standard, Reed said.
"With any standard, some group would say it's not rigorous enough," Reed said.
