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The People

Voices of Salmon Nation

Larry Potts & Charley Miller

Central Oregon forest and wood-product certification early-adopters LARRY POTTS of Warm Springs Forest Products Industries and CHARLEY MILLER of Miller Lumber talked with us about the importance of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification.


Larry Potts
CEO, Warm Springs Forest Products Industries

In 1992, I was general manager of the Chester, California operations at Collins Pine when we first started looking at forest certification. Among the forestry department, there was some reticence at first. Foresters don't like people from the outside coming in and telling them how to manage their forest.

Still, we felt that certification was the right thing to do, and that there may be some opportunities in the market to differentiate Collins products. As we worked with FSC, the whole idea of public trust resources really came together for me. Even though someone may own a forest, they still have a public trust, a responsibility, for those other values, such as air and water and wildlife. Those attributes don't know a political boundary.

Through this work, we also met some very interesting people coming out of environmental groups. And we realized that we had many ideas in common — thoughts like: "What is the desired future condition of the forest?"

Then in 2000, I started working with Warm Springs. The tribes saw that FSC certification correlated with their values and beliefs about managing the forest. And because we see certified products as our future, we want our customers to share in that vision and in that leadership. In January 2004, we invited 20 of our customers to spend the day at Warm Springs, and that's when our relationship with Miller Lumber started. Charley showed up with one of his people.

Later in the year, Charley called Janet Corbett, our sales manager, and said he was ready to start carrying our product. Charley asked what the largest amount of certified product purchased was. It was something like 190,000 board feet. So Charley said, I'll order 200,000 board feet. He wanted to come in making the single largest purchase of certified product. It was a great way to start the relationship: someone from Central Oregon making a strong statement on sustainable forestry. We have very similar values.


Charley Miller
Owner, Miller Lumber

We first looked into being FSC certified in 1999, but over the next few years and for all practical purposes, it just was not that available.

Now with Warm Springs coming online, we have a local source that enables local builders to complete an entire job using FSC certified lumber. So in October, I took a dive into certified wood — about 200,000 board feet. I figured I'd give it a shot.

Essentially, you commit to keeping certified lumber separate from non-certified lumber, and document the chain of custody of the certified lumber. Even though the wood looks the same, customers have to know what is certified and what's not. Our yard is trained to treat certified as if it were another species.

The real cost in getting certified is not financial, it's in making the commitment: setting up separate SKUs on your computer, training the employees on new procedures, carrying more inventory. The financial cost is not too big a deal. It's more of headache. There are a couple of months of transition, but any yard should look into it.

Initially we thought that the certified lumber would be a small part of the yard. But then partway into stocking the lumber, we made certified wood our primary stocking item, and eventually shipped all the noncertified wood to one of our other yards. The cost is slightly higher, but because we buy it in volume and from a local source, the cost to the end user is negligible. We've kept our existing customers and maybe even gained some customers.

Now, there's a growing awareness. I think the demand is there in the marketplace, but we need more producers to step up like Warm Springs has.

 

I believe that wood is the absolute greenest building method, because wood is renewable. If you use steel, you mine iron ore, you take it out of ground — and you can take it out just once — and it takes energy to make a steel stud. It's completely inefficient.

It's part of a circle. We all want to see well-managed forests.

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