Nadine Block, who focuses on Government Outreach for SFI, headed to the USGBC Federal Summit. The Summit was held at the Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center May 18-19. Check out her coverage of the event below.
The USGBC Federal Summit in Washington DC last week was a great opportunity to promote SFI forest certification and certified wood products in green building and to display the groundswell of support that has been built to end LEED’s FSC-only stance. We have gathered 5,700 petition signatures (ipetitions.com/petition/leed), a multitude of letters, articles and opinion pieces, and many other signs of support (forests.org/leed/). These have come from a whole host of voices including builders, elected officials, scientists, professional foresters, green building organizations, family forest landowners, conservation groups, architects and many more.
Participating in the Summit built on this momentum. I hosted a “Knowledge Bar” which provided an excellent opportunity to showcase the SFI name and label to the 700+ participants at the Summit. It also provided a great venue to engage participants one-on-one in a dialogue about the role of forest certification in green building rating systems. I talked with participants about the credibility, strength, and scope of the SFI program. Many were impressed with what the SFI program does and appreciated our concern that the LEED rating system is not inclusive of all third-party forest certification systems.
More and more people are learning about SFI and why LEED should be open to all credible forest certification standards. Our efforts are building a strong force. The USGBC Federal Summit not only showed this, but it also added to what we’ve built. Let’s keep the ball rolling.
