Glulam Perspectives: #FSC Wood and #LEED

Note: Glulam Perspectives is a new quarterly series on Unalam’s Wood Times blog. In each article we will take an in-depth look at a project or issue in the timber industry from our unique standpoint as a glulam manufacturer. These are our opinions and we invite constructive discussion. Next time, we will focus on a completely different topic, so stay tuned.

Our Forest Stewardship Council™ (FSC®) Story

SAP Headquarters under construction

For more than a decade, we have seen the number of jobs with certified lumber specified increase each year. This growth has been driven, in great part, by the USGBC’s LEED certification program that awards a point for using FSC lumber in a building project (this has changed a bit in LEED version 4 and now there is a potential for more points for certified lumber and wood in general.) 


Seeing this industry trend, in 2007 we initially became FSC Chain-of-Custody certified for purchasing, manufacturing, and selling FSC pure and FSC mixed lumber for use in our custom glulam material. Our very first FSC project was a classroom building at the William D. McDowell Observatory in Lindhurst, NJ. Later in 2007, we also supplied glulam beams and columns manufactured out of FSC certified lumber for SAP Americas Headquarters in Newtown Square, PA. That building was later certified LEED Platinum.

FSC certified arches at Shelia Johnson Design Center – Morrisville, NY

In the years since we were initially certified, we have worked on over 25 other projects, adding up to more than $1.5 million. Considering the “Great Recession” in those intervening years, supplying FSC certified glulam has added significantly to our business. Combine that with the fact that we estimate around 75% of bid jobs that come into our office initially request FSC certified material. Of those, about one-third of them actually end up using FSC material.

You can’t tell the difference between certified and conventional lumber just by looking

Being Chain-of-Custody certified means that we have a bit more of a paperwork and inventory organization burden during our production process; we have to verify that every piece of lumber included in our FSC job can be traced back to its original sustainable and certified source. But otherwise, our certified projects are manufactured the same as non-certified ones. (You may be surprised to learn that we have often been asked whether FSC material is somehow stronger than conventional lumber, but it isn’t.) Using FSC material on a job will typically add about 20% to the cost of the project over using conventional material. This price premium helps explain why not all jobs that initially plan to use FSC material actually end up being manufactured that way.


Because we are a manufacturer, our ability to incorporate FSC material into a project depends on having ready availability of FSC lumber from suppliers. Recent discussions with these mills suggest that they are considering not renewing their certification. Reasons include: certification cost, compliance burden, competing standards, and more. In the end, mills need to make money to stay in business, and if they feel that they are losing money on their FSC products then we are left in a very tough situation. At a time when we are getting more and more requests to manufacture out of FSC material, our supply may be drying up.


It remains to be seen whether the number of FSC certified mills will decrease, but we expect that the demand for FSC material will continue to increase into the near future, especially with the new LEED version 4. We still need to raise awareness among our suppliers of the increasing demand for certified material and among our customers of the issues affecting our material supply.