Lumber

With lumber making up such a huge portion of the home building process, it is especially important to use environmentally friendly materials. The best way to do this is by ensuring that your home, deck, fence, or other wood products are made with certified lumber. While carbon emissions and energy savings get more headlines, deforestation is also a serious environmental issue. Certified lumber is lumber that is produced by a company which focuses on sustainability, which involves helping to renew forests that are harvested for lumber. Besides harvesting, there is also something known as the chain of custody, which helps track what companies developed the lumber and which ones transported it. Chain of custody is important because it protects the certification labels from being faked, as well as showing how far the lumber was shipped from. Lumber that is shipped great distances loses its green  value due to the emissions that were produced in transporting it. There are numerous third party companies that have certification programs for lumber, but the two largest in the United States are the Sustainable Forestry Initiative and the Forest Stewardship Council. Both of these companies track the harvesting and chain of custody of the lumber they certify, guaranteeing environmentally friendly lumber.