Rainforest Relief has been directly engaging the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (Parks) since 1995. Parks uses ipê, logged from the rainforests of the Amazon in Brazil, for miles of boardwalks, tens of thousands of park benches, dozens of bridges and hundreds of playground swing sets. Ipê logging in Brazil is a nightmare of illegality, violent conflict with indigenous people and rainforest destruction.

We have made some progress in this campaign. Parks switched from tropical wood for playsets to a recycled plastic/wood composite. As well, Parks designed a new bench to utilize durable recycled plastic lumber (RPL) slats and has begun to shift to RPL use in two other bench designs.

Parks has yet to use RPL for their “World’s Fair” bench the most common bench type in the city. Most of Manhattan’s benches are the World’s Fair design and utilize ipê. Parks refuses to utilize RPL for the World’s Fair bench, claiming that its 2” x 3” slats are too thin for RPL to work. Yet the new bench designed to utilize RPL uses 2x3s.

Parks has begun to test RPL on a few ramps to the boardwalk but has yet to even try RPL for boardwalk decking, for which they currently use ipê. Their claim is that the RPL isn’t stiff enough to carry the weight of the trucks Parks personnel use to collect the trash or the emergency vehicles that frequently need to drive on the boardwalk. But the best structural RPLs on the market are about as stiff as southern yellow pine, the most common decking material for boardwalks and decking in the eastern US and what Parks was using before they switched to tropical hardwoods. So this argument doesn’t hold water.

We’ve found that Parks has yet to make a concerted and coördinated effort to phase out the use of tropical hardwoods and they’ve still refused to state a date by which they intend to do so.

Send a message to NYC Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, asking him to commit to an entire phase-out of destructive and mostly illegally logged tropical hardwoods.