This credit can be easy and with little or no cost premium if your project only has a small amount of wood. A multifamily high-rise, for example, may have little wood on the project except for doors and cabinetry. In this case, it would be easy to reach the 50% Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) threshold.

Projects with more wood might encounter a larger upfront cost, but have the potential to demonstrate their environmental values of sustainable forestry management. Projects can also go above the 50% threshold and earn an ID point for 95% FSC certified wood. For example, a commercial interior fit-out for an investment bank involved large amounts of wood veneers and millwork. The project purchased 97% FSC-certified wood, earning an additional exemplary performance point under IDc1.

No minimum amount of wood

This credit awards points for dedicating 50% or more of your total new wood budget to wood-based products or materials that are FSC certified. 

You can use as much or as little total wood as you want—as long as 50% of it is FSC-certified. If you make it 95%, you earn an extra point for exemplary performance. 

More wood = more challenging

If wood is a big part of your project, with a lot of wood flooring, framing, or veneers, you’re unlikely to earn this credit unless you can find a source of FSC-certified wood for those items that’s within your budget. Projects without wood as a big-ticket item should focus instead on other wood materials, including blocking, millwork, and wood finish materials, as well as casework, and wood composites.

All projects should get their subcontractor, vendor, or lumberyard on board to price available—and preferably regional, for MRc5—FSC-certified products early in the process. You can usually find an FSC-certified version of what you need, but it sometimes takes longer to arrive.

Not all FSC-certified products are equal

Pay attention to the different types of FSC certification. You can find these on product cut sheets: 

• FSC 100%  (previously "FSC Pure"): Valued at 100% of product cost. 
• FSC Mix Credit: Valued at 100% of product cost.
• FSC Mix (XX)%: A percentage of FSC content is indicated and you can claim that percentage of the wood product’s cost. For example, FSC Mixed 50%, means that you can claim 50% of the wood product’s cost.
• FSC Recycled and FSC Recycled Credit: These do not count towards this credit and can be left out of the baseline wood budget. FSC Recycled wood can count towards MRc4: Recycled Content. 

Chain-of-custody certification

Wood is FSC-certified if it comes from the right forests. To ensure that the same FSC-certified wood that leaves the forest arrives at your building without being mixed up with conventional wood, FSC oversees another certification process—chain-of-custody certification, or CoC.

CoC certification tracks FSC-certified wood as it moves through harvesting, production, manufacturing, and distributing chains. In order for your LEED project to make a claim about FSC wood you use, you need to make sure that the product is handled by operations carrying CoC certifications at every step. Those needing CoC certifications (see Checklists for more detail) should provide their certification number on their invoices. Certified operators can also be found on the FSC website.

Why FSC?

The Forest Stewardship Council is a nonprofit organization that was created to set an international standard for responsible forest management, and to track and certify wood products from well-managed forests. FSC certification ensures that your wood products have come from third-party-certified forests that comply with the FSC principles and criteria. 

The "wood wars"

FSC is only one of dozens of forest certification programs in the world. Others include the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) and the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) label. FSC currently remains the only program recognized for this credit. Following lengthy development of a more inclusive policy at USGBC, USGBC membership voted to reject the new policy. BuildingGreen.com, a sister publication to LEEDuser, chronicled the extensive debate over FSC and other certification schemes in a series of articles, including articles looking at the impact of certification on jobs, on climate change, and the future of forest certification in LEED.

Although FSC provides the certification standard, other groups provide the audits that determine whether certification can actually be awarded to a forest. The two groups most commonly seen here are SmartWood and SCS Global Services.

Rapidly renewable materials

Woody rapidly renewable materials like bamboo and cork have not generally been covered by this credit, because they are not conventional lumber products, because they are already covered under MRc6: Rapidly Renewable Materials (except for LEED-CS), and because FSC certification had not been available for these products until recently. However, with the advent of FSC-certified bamboo products, teams may include bamboo and cork in MRc7, at their discretion. It would only be advantageous to do so if you are using FSC-certified products; otherwise, it would make credit compliance harder.