When building a home with a sustainability focus, using wood often first comes to mind, and a certification by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is the guarantee to be sustainable with every architectural design.

25th of September is FSC Friday, an annual celebration of this certification aiming to protect the World's forests from over-exploitation.

The character wood brings to a home is unbeatable, be it in the form of decking, flooring or wall cladding, and so is the carbon and energy efficiency it creates in comparison to other building materials. However, it is easy to think that the very use of wood in design is de facto part of the growing sustainable living trend. Unfortunately, a lot of this wood comes from forests with unsustainable management practices, which completely undermines the initial thought. This is particularly true for exotic wood logged illegally from deforestation "champions" such as Indonesia, Malaysia or Brazil. Choosing FSC certified wood is the eco-friendly choice for nature lovers.

Aside from the management of forests itself, the recycling of old wood from barns, factories or houses is becoming increasingly popular among architects whose creative minds design buildings with reclaimed wood. This is with this opportunity in mind that we embraced the circular economy movement by hunting for disused structures in deforestation-prone East Kalimantan (Borneo island).

Kaltimber has been FSC Recycled Certified since 2019 thanks to their ethical sourcing of materials which previous life is the certitude of conveying centuries of stories from the time it was only a seed, to the time it has been processed into boards used in various kinds of building and later reprocessed into new construction materials. We say "centuries" because Kaltimber is specialized in ironwood (Ulin), an essence with an extremely slow growth rate at less than 0.5mm a year. It results in a highly dense wood ideal for exterior applications, but it also means that for a tree to reach a size suitable for logging, it would take 200 to 300 years. The wood's amazing strength and resistance to termites have led to unsustainable logging while its slow growth made it very rare to find nowadays. Hence, reusing old ironwood is primordial to ensure that no more trees at logged.

Kaltimber is specialized in processing reclaimed ironwood into decking and flooring, but the success of their FSC certifications has led to custom inquiries: "Our policy is to only source our woods from structures that are genuinely slated for demolition, and that will either not be replaced or only be replaced with wood harvested from legal and/or sustainable sources," says Guillaume Carnevale, Katlimber's Director.

Our mission is to supply character-filled lumber to create beautiful products to add warmth, character history to any home or exterior.

If Nature would speak, it would certainly thank companies for choosing the FSC certification, but it would also be grateful to every homeowner and builder who would make the choice to source their wood from organizations with a genuine heart for sustainability highlighted through such certification.