Following on the heels of our Coney Island action and due to the press coverage in Newsday, in 1998, Rainforest Relief was informed of the impending use of 20,000 board feet of tropical hardwoods in Greenport, New York, a village at the extreme tip of the southern fork at the end of Long Island.
Greenport had designed and was building a boardwalk and pier project in this tiny town to attract tourism. Once again, pushed by Timber Holdings, Ltd., Greenport and the architects of the project had opted for tropical hardwoods, again calling for ipe.

Rainforest Relief and some local residents took up the fight. In a four-month campaign that included hanging a banner from a building roof on Main Street (see photo), RR was able to convince the City Council to vote against the use of uncertified rainforest woods.

Eventually, actions like these forced Timber Holdings, the largest supplier of tropical wood decking in the U.S., to get chain-of-custody certified and to begin to make independently certified wood available. But this occurred with a lot of resistance. To this day, Timber Holdings will only sell actual certified wood if the customer demands it and demands to see that actual certificates from the exporting company (see Rainforest Reliefs report, Certified to Confuse)

This is a larger victory than it at first may seem, since Greenports plans included phases II and III of the project, which will eventually have used a total of approximately 400,000 board feet of tropical hardwoods within next 3 years.

We learned late in 2001 that Greenport had indeed purchased certified wood for Phase II of their new boardwalk. This purchase, supplied by Timber Holdings and sourced from CIKEL in Brazil, further adds to the record of Rainforest Relief campaigns generating the largest purchases of certified tropical hardwood in US history. To view the certificates, click here.

The top four purchases of certified tropical wood are Philadelphias Strawberry Mansion Bridge (120,000 board feet of curupau); Disneys boardwalk in California (30,000 board feet of ip); Long Beach, CAs Pine Avenue Pier at the Queensway Bay waterfront (23,000 board feet of ipe); and Greenports boardwalk (20,000 board feet). All of these purchases came about due to Rainforest Relief campaigns.

Rainforest Relief does not actively promote the use of certified tropical woods. Our position continues to be that we will not campaign against the use of certified woods. Research has shown that even low-impact logging permanently damages rainforests. Recovery of species diversity can take as long as 10 million years. Therefore, we continue to promote the use of non-wood alternatives as the first choice for waterfront construction. However, over and over we have only become aware of rainforest wood projects at the 11th hour when switching to certified wood is the best that we can wrest from an impending tragedy.