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Wood is Good

We at Rochester Lumber Company are proud to be part of the lumber industry, through our supplying products to Rochester’s quality home builders and remodelers. America builds with wood, because unlike most other products, it is America’s RENEWABLE RESOURCE. Wood can be reused, recycled, and is biodegradable. It is the best insulator of all structural building materials, thereby conserving our environment by requiring less fossil fuel or coal to heat/cool buildings. It also takes less energy to transform trees into wood products than it does to manufacture steel, aluminum, masonry, or plastic products. Wood has many environmental advantages that it rightly is and should be America’s first choice.

Today, America is NOT running out of trees.
•One third of our county is forested.
•In 1941, the year Weyerhaeuser started the first certified tree farm, U.S. loggers were harvesting 20% more timber than nature regenerated each year. Twenty-five years latter, this nation was growing 60% more than it was harvesting. In 1995 alone, 1.6 Billion seedlings were planted in the U.S., and there are still more than 10 Million acres of “old growth” forests in Oregon, Washington, and California alone.
•Remember the Spotted Owl? This species was the excuse used to try to stop timber harvests in the western U.S. forests. In the 1970’s we were told that there were only 200 pair of these owls, and that they lived only in old growth forests. By 1992, 3510 pair of this shy “endangered” species had been identified, living in both old and new growth forests.

As you learned in school, a young growing forest removes the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, while producing oxygen. This is reversed in an old decaying forest.

Our country has the best forestry practices in the world. We have changed with the times, and are striving to improve every day. We are not the industry of 100 years ago. Unfortunately, other countries do not have our foresight and live up to our standards. We must beware that the overregulation of our forests will not force other countries to see our wisdom, it will just raise timber prices, thereby encouraging poor forestry practices in other cash poor parts of the world, and cost all of us much more in the long run.

We believe that lumber has an important place in our lives and in our future. It is renewable, reusable, and efficient. Wood should be your choice.



The original purpose of this page was to list sites that gave you the above information, such as www.forestinfo.org. Please visit this site, as they give you many more facts to help you form an educated opinion.