Timber Business Backs
A New 'Green' Standard

The building industry is going through an environmental revolution. "Green" schools, skyscrapers and houses are popping up everywhere.

Now rival groups are jockeying for position in government adoption of environmental rules that determine whether a building can call itself green. An upstart organization with strong ties to the timber industry is touting guidelines that challenge a widely accepted program that has certified buildings such as the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark., and 7 World Trade Center, the first tower rebuilt near Ground Zero in New York.

At stake directly is the "greenness" of $200 billion a year in government-financed construction projects, from schools to courthouses to hospitals. The impact could be even greater if, as some predict, the standards slowly become part of building codes, and thus mandatory for private-sector projects such as offices, shopping malls and houses. That, in turn, could influence how much wood goes into buildings, compared with other materials such as steel, plastics and cement. More than $1 trillion is spent on construction each year in the U.S., according to the Commerce Department.

The Green Building Initiative, which is led by a former timber-company executive and received much of its seed money from timber and wood-products companies, is promoting a green-building verification program called Green Globes. It says Green Globes is scientifically rigorous. Critics say it is self-serving.

Green Globes gives "clout and recognition to a system that is not much more than industry wishful thinking," says Katherine Kennedy, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Her group, along with a coalition of architects, real-estate developers and building-materials manufacturers, backs a rival program by the U.S. Green Building Council, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization. Its certification system, known by its acronym LEED, for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, has been used by private developers, the federal government's General Services Administration, more than a dozen states and several dozen cities.

Already two states, Maryland and Arkansas, have adopted Green Globes as an alternative to LEED -- giving officials a choice for government-funded construction -- despite the fact that the industry-backed standard hadn't been used in the U.S. until last fall. The American Forest & Paper Association, a Washington, D.C., trade group spearheading the legislative initiative, also convinced Congress to instruct the executive branch to re-evaluate its current green-building guidelines, which mostly use LEED.

"Green Globes is much more wood-friendly than LEED," says John Mechem, a spokesman for the trade group. "We can't live with LEED alone. It disadvantages wood products in general and disadvantages our companies," he says.

With all the attention paid to cars and factories as polluting energy-guzzlers, buildings are rarely considered. Yet they account for one-third of U.S. energy use, 30% of greenhouse-gas emissions, and 30% of raw material use, according to the Green Building Council.

An interim report published this year from the National Research Council found evidence that students perform better in schools with green features such as increased light and less noise. Upfront costs tend to be about 2% to 5% higher because of special materials and consultants. But the buildings save money over the long term due to energy savings.

Under both competing groups' standards, green buildings tend to use less water, be more energy efficient and have healthier indoor air through the use of low chemical-emitting paints and carpets. Green buildings also get credit for being closer to public transportation, using solar or wind power and collecting rainwater for use in toilets and watering shrubs.

This isn't the first time the timber industry has supported a new green standard to compete with an existing one. Five years ago, timber companies rolled out a green "seal of approval" for lumber, trying to supplant a seal supported by environmentalists.

LEED gives credit to projects that use wood certified by the international accrediting group Forest Stewardship Council -- a provision some timber companies dislike. The council approves wood from forests that are managed in a way aimed at protecting the environment. For example, timber must come from so-called sustainable forestry practices that include replanting and ensuring that wood isn't poached from environmentally protected areas. The timber industry says that standard is too expensive and that industry-promulgated wood-certification programs should also qualify.

The industry also says LEED doesn't take into account "life-cycle analysis," or an overall measure of a material's effect on the environment. "Wood takes much less energy to manufacture than competing products such as steel and cement," says Mr. Mechem.

The Green Building Initiative was founded in late 2004. Much of its seed money -- the organization won't disclose how much -- came from the Wood Promotion Network, an industry consortium that includes the American Forest & Paper Association. The Wood Promotion Network was formed in the 1990s to fend off a steel-industry advertising campaign.

Kelly McCloskey, the network's president, says that threat has dissipated. Meanwhile, the green-building issue has cropped up. The network gave money to Green Building Initiative because its Green Globes program "treated wood very neutrally," he says.

Leaders of the Green Building Initiative don't hide that its initial funding came from the timber industry and others in the construction-materials realm. "We make zero bones about it -- we are industry-funded," says Ward Hubbell, a former public-relations executive with Louisiana-Pacific Corp. who is now executive director of the Green Building Initiative. Early donations came from a "pretty small number of folks who were angel investors," he says. But he stresses that the group has a diversified board of directors, with one-third of the spots reserved for developers, architects and engineers, one-third for materials manufacturers and one-third for academics and nonprofit officials.

The initiative, based in Portland, Ore., has around a $3.5 million budget, and is applying to be a nonprofit under federal and Oregon tax codes. Mr. Hubbell says the initiative's funding sources are now more diverse and include money from financial-services, appliance, chemical, insulation and air-conditioning and heating industries.

Critics say Green Globes is untested in the U.S. In October it gave its only approval so far, to a 7,000-square-foot community center in the Seattle suburb of Issaquah. In Canada, where Green Globes was first developed, it is used primarily for renovations, not new construction. By contrast, the Green Building Council has certified 430 buildings since 2000 and another 3,655 are registered to be certified upon completion.

Some 25 states have passed or are considering legislation that would require government-funded projects to meet the Green Building Council's standard. Another 48 cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago also have adopted LEED.

Dan Morhaim, a Baltimore County representative in Maryland's House of Delegates, was a sponsor of green-building legislation passed there last year and has another bill this year. The bills include both competing groups. He says lobbyists for local timber industry opposed LEED unless the state also wrote Green Globes into the law. "There are a lot of legislators who have forest interests," he says, "and it was important to bring them on board."

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