After discovering that the boardwalk in Coney Island was decked with tropical hardwoods, in 1995, Rainforest Relief began gearing up a campaign to end the use of rainforest woods by New York City — which we later deduced is the single largest consumer of tropical hardwoods in North America (we've since come to realize that NYC may be the single largest end-user of tropical hardwoods in the world outside of the tropics!). Having started in the 1960s, the city has now entirely converted 10 miles of coastal boardwalks to tropical hardwoods. We’ve estimated that this has consumed nearly 10 million board feet of tropical wood, driving the logging of over one hundred and thirty thousand acres of Amazon rainforests. The boardwalks are considered parks and are maintained by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC Parks).

Besides the boardwalks, NYC Parks uses tropical hardwoods for new park benches (there are tens of thousands of them), for decking of over a dozen park bridges, and even for playsets in park playgrounds. All in all, NYC Parks is assumed to be the largest tropical-hardwood-consuming city agency outside of the tropics and maybe on the entire planet.

But NYC’s rainforest wood use doesn’t stop there. New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) uses vast quantities of tropical hardwoods for the terminals of the Staten Island Ferry as well as the decking and benches of the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian promenade. The ferry terminals alone have consumed thousands of whole greenheart logs — ripped from the rainforests of Greenheart trees grow only one or two per acre and therefore thousands of acres have been logged to get the trees for the Staten Island Ferry.

And there’s more. New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA), part of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) now uses wood logged from the rainforests of west mahogany window frames for city buildings and dozens of city offices are paneled and furnished with rainforest woods.

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