Mar 17 2010
Choosing wood floors for your home is one of the easiest ways to ensure that your flooring is environmentally friendly. The raw material necessary to make wood floors – trees – is a resource that can be renewed time and time again, but how can you be sure that the wood you are buying was legally harvested?
In the United States, illegal logging is extremely rare, but in other areas of the world, illegal logging is epidemic. The National Wood Flooring Association recognized that this practice threatens our environment and partnered with several environmental groups to develop a program to combat this issue.
The NWFA Responsible Procurement Program was created by the NWFA to recognize those companies that work to preserve our world’s forests for generations to come, and while the NWFA cannot govern how countries harvest their wood, the U.S. Lacey Act, which the NWFA supported, now bans the import of wood that is illegally harvested according to the laws of the country of origin.
To help consumers recognize legally imported wood flooring, the NWFA developed the “Legal” logo. Look for the “Legal” logo to identify those imported products that help protect our environment.
Source: http://www.nwfa.org