Green Specifying For Commercial Applications

Our commitment to environmental stewardship leads us to our pledge to promote Green Specifying. To fully understand this, a basic knowledge of the manufacturing process is crucial.

Often, large commercial projects are specified in such a way as to produce an incredibly large amount of waste material. It's not uncommon for these projects to specify all the same product for the entire project; all 4 " wide, Select Grade Red Oak for example. To manufacture such a large amount of one specific product from a natural resource like lumber is very difficult to do without being wasteful. Consider a 100,000sqft project specified at 4" Select & Better Red Oak. There are two ways this project can be accomplished. The first is for the manufacturer to run enough lumber to accumulate the required amount of material while maintaining an efficient yield. To do this the manufacturer would also generate a certain amount of other widths and grades from the lumber in order to maintain the yield. Take a look at this normal yield sheet of red oak lumber.

This sheet shows the maximum yield from the raw material. Running multiple widths and grades is the best way to get a high yield out of the lumber. Now think again of the job that specified 100,000sqft of only 4” Select & Better Red Oak. If you look at this yield sheet you can see that in this run, 4” Select & Better Red Oak made up only 17% of the yield. The manufacturer would have to make this same production run another six times to accumulate 100,000sqft of the specified item; that’s 562,680sqft of Red Oak produced just to get the 100,000sqft to fill the order.  Unless a manufacturer already has a market for all the other items it would be difficult to justify this amount of production.

The Second and only other way to fill this order would be to take all the 5” from the yield and run it down into 4” flooring. This is what often has to happen to fulfill single product specifications. In order to fill this specification it would, in effect, waste nearly 33,000sqft of usable lumber.  Although this can and does happen it is a terrible waste of our natural resources. This is why when this type of specification crosses our desk we try to educate the end-user that multiple widths and grades, or for that matter species, in the specification is the environmentally friendly way to specify wood flooring.  Here is one example of how this has worked for us.

Early in 2005 we were asked if we could fill a specification for a commercial job that required 97,000sqft of 4" #2 Red Oak. After we explained that this was very difficult to fill we began exploring the idea of a more environmentally friendly alternative. We proposed two options to the customer; the first was to consider keeping the product 4" Red Oak but to change the grade specification to Millrun.  Millrun simply means keeping all of the grades from the yield together instead of sorting them apart in order to get more total footage out of each production run.  The second option we proposed was to place a display in the model unit showing the 4" Red Oak along with five other flooring options in various species and widths. Their initial response was that they wanted to go with all 4" Red Oak even if it would mean we would lose yield in the raw material because the architect and builder didn’t think any potential buyers would be willing to spend more to upgrade to a different type of flooring.  They did, however, agree to place the display and offer the five other flooring options after the model unit was finished with the 4" Millrun Red Oak. In the end, nearly 80% of the buyers chose to pay the upgrade costs to use different flooring. This averted us from having to waste raw material to fill the specification and at the same time gave the homeowners the option to customize their homes.