Thursday, 17 February 2005
Congratulations to Potlatch Corporation
BuildingGreen Announces 2004 Top-10 Green Building Products
BuildingGreen, Inc., publisher of the GreenSpec® Directory and Environmental Building News™, announced its selections of the top ten green building products of 2004. This third annual award, announced in November at the U.S. Green Building Council’s Greenbuild Conference in Portland, Oregon, recognizes the most exciting products added to the GreenSpec Directory during the past year (though some products may have been on the market longer).
One of this year’s winners was FSC-certified framing lumber, plywood, and cedar from Potlatch Corporation. In 2004, Potlatch Corporation became the first publicly traded U.S. timber company to certify timberland according to Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standards. In April 2004, Scientific Certification Systems (SCS) completed the FSC certification of 668,000 acres of land in Idaho; another 805,000 acres of timberland in Arkansas and Minnesota are expected to obtain FSC certification in 2005. Potlatch is producing chain-of-custody FSC-certified Hem-Fir and Douglas Fir-Larch framing lumber, inland red cedar decking and siding, and Douglas fir and white fir plywood from three mills in Idaho.
BuildingGreen’s Top-10 product selections this year demonstrate the tremendous innovation coming out of the building-products industry. “New products are appearing all the time,” said Wilson. “Our staff can hardly keep up with the research required to screen them and compile listings for our GreenSpec product directory,” he said. About half of the Top-10 products this year are used primarily in commercial buildings; the rest are used in homes or in all types of buildings.
A big driver in the development of green products is the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED® Rating System (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), which awards points for certain product characteristics or the energy or water savings they can achieve. “Designers of LEED buildings are looking for green products, and manufacturers are responding,” said Wilson.
GreenSpec is the leading national directory of green building products. The 1,800-plus products included in the directory are selected by editors of Environmental Building News (EBN) based on criteria developed over the past 13 years. Manufacturers do not pay to be listed in GreenSpec, and neither GreenSpec nor EBN carry advertising; both are supported by users of the information. “This policy of not accepting money from manufacturers allows us to be objective in reviewing products for inclusion,” said Wilson. A complete list of this year’s Top 10 winners can be found at www.BuildingGreen.com.