Our project is a 6-floor office building with multiple company departments where most of the occupied areas are open spaces. We intend to apply wood-based products in the technical floor (access floor). The access floor squares will be made out of a wood particleboard core encapsulated inside an aluminum box and supported on metal supports, to allow the passage of all the cables and wires. The function of the wood-based board is to give the necessary stiffness and bending strength to the whole assembly and, therefore, it will be totally enclosed inside this aluminum box. The manufacturer is strongly committed to comply with this LEED credit, so that, although the manufacturer has factories in Portugal, it will produce the wood-based board in its factory in United Kingdom which is a FSC certified factory and can provide a FSC COC certification. However, its factory in United Kingdom is not prepared to encapsulate the wood-board inside the aluminum box and this procedure will be undertaken in one of its client in Portugal. Therefore no additional wood is incorporated into the process in Portugal and the manufacturer can provide evidence that all wood-board is FSC certified. Can we consider the technical floor as having a FSC certification, although the final product (aluminum box filled with wood particle board) does not have a COC certification?
No, the project team may not consider the technical floor as having FSC certification. FSC Chain-of-Custody (C-O-C) requirements issued by USGBC on 4/7/2008 requires C-O-C certification for each vendor of FSC products, thus the FSC certified wood boards used in this product may only be counted towards achievement of this credit if the factory assembling the final product also has C-O-C Certification. In addition, FSC certification applies to wood or other forest-based materials only. As the technical floor consists of both wood based and non-wood based products, the assembled product itself cannot be classified as an FSC product (only the wood component can contribute, provided C-O-C requirements are met). For additional guidance, please refer to the FSC Chain-of-Custody requirements issued by USGBC and FSC on 4/7/2008, as found on the USGBC website here: https://www.usgbc.org/ShowFile.aspx?DocumentID=4027. Applicable Internationally.