March 1, 2014
Which is better for the environment—hardwood floors or bamboo floors? If you’ve read all the hype lately, you’ll probably answer bamboo. After all, it grows quickly, it’s sustainable and it can be used to make flooring, baskets, skateboards, even headphones and computer keyboards.
Palm oil, too, seems to be a great environmental choice. It requires a lot less land to obtain oil from palm trees than it does from soybeans. A product that gets higher yields using less land sounds like a green choice.
Dig a little further, however, and you’ll discover that products touted as being sustainable aren’t necessarily the best environmental or humane choice—there’s habitat destruction, transportation and work conditions to be considered.
Sustainability refers to the fact that materials taken from the environment can replenish themselves. Those that grow more quickly are said to be more sustainable.
As one of the fastest-growing plants, bamboo can be harvested in three years, while oak trees can take dozens of years or more before they can be cut. Plus bamboo—grown in Southeast Asia including China and India— regenerates every few years without needing to be replanted.
But because of the high demand for bamboo, growers are beginning to use fertilizers for quicker harvesting and they are clearing native forests to create more bamboo plantations, said Jeffrey Howe, president of Dovetail Partners, Inc. The 10-year-old watchdog group researches products to discover the impacts and trade-offs on the environment.
These forests provide homes to native plants and animals, including the giant panda, an endangered species, and the red panda, a species whose numbers are declining. While China seems to be getting the idea that clearing too much forest harms the giant panda, India continues to clear forests that threaten the existence of native animals, Howe said. Red panda populations are declining across much of their range because their forested homes are being cleared, according to the World Wildlife Foundation.
Meanwhile, orangutan populations have decreased by approximately 50 percent in the wild because of the destruction of their habitat to create palm oil plantations, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.
In Indonesia, labor unions have protested to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil that employees are receiving low wages and working in unsafe conditions. In some cases, child labor is used to harvest the oil.
Once the raw material is harvested, workers need to create products people will buy, leading to another set of environmental problems. Bamboo products are often made by using toxic products such as formaldehyde, which outgasses in people’s homes as well as harms the health of workers.
Another part of the environmental life cycle of foreign products that needs to be considered is transportation. For example, the bamboo harvested in China is put on a truck, taken to a port, then loaded on a ship, then loaded on a truck to the Midwest, said Jim Bowyer, director of responsible materials program for Dovetail Inc. Considering all the gas that’s used for transportation, “that’s a high environmental cost,” he said. Bowyer goes so far as to say that domestically produced oak could be, in the long run, more environmentally sound than some bamboo products.
It might seem like you’d have to wade through a quagmire of facts and articles to decide which international products are truly environmentally friendly.
It helps just knowing that international watchdog groups such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and Dovetail, Inc., are out there to keep manufacturers and growers honest. In addition, manufacturers are starting to get called on the carpet, so to speak, about selling products that aren’t grown sustainably.
Gibson guitars, for example, paid a $300,000 fine for violating the Lacey Act, which requires firms to obtain timber products legally. The ebony and rosewood imported from Madagascar and India to build some if its products were, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, illegally obtained by deforesting areas where rare animals such as lemurs live.
The average retailer and buyer can do some of their own digging as well. You can look for certification systems on products, such as bamboo. One company, Smith & Fong, sells sustainable bamboo, Howe said. It’s been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.
You can also go online to learn if a product has received an international environmental product declaration (EPD), which means it’s an environmentally sound product based on examining its life cycle from planting to harvesting to transporting to manufacturing.
It’s a green yardstick for all kinds of products.
Check www.environdec.com and you’ll find, for example, that Monini olive oil, sold in North America, has received the EPD stamp of approval. So too has Barilla pasta, and Cormo windows are created with nontoxic substances. Or check ecologo.org, which lists products for consumers and retailers that have been examined throughout their lifecycle to gain environmental certification.
“Everybody has to make their own choices,” Howe said. But if you ask specific questions and do some homework, you’re likely to make a better choice. He’s optimistic that getting the dirt on truly sustainable products will get easier.