There are many claims from furniture manufacturers and retailers about the furniture on display at their showroom or website-about durability, comfort, value, and even about environmental friendliness or “green” qualities.

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Some considerations to think about when shopping for eco-friendly furniture, discussed here, will help you qualify what the terms really mean and what things are important and which are “puffery”.

Furniture and furnishings are the third largest user of wood and wood products, after building and paper, and there is a high transport cost of wood. So, if imported (from Asia especially), wood products will have a high “carbon footprint” for furniture sold in the US. However, there are some choices that you can make as a consumer, and a big one is the source of the lumber used.

In wood furniture and in the wood frames of upholstered furniture-there are two certifying organizations that the manufacturer will tout if they used certified sources. The most stringent is “FSC” (Forestry Stewardship Council) and is used mostly for export lumber and by European lumber suppliers. The same is true for PEFC (Programme for Endorsement of Forest Certification). Many domestic (US) lumber mills are smaller and only sell to domestic users and so adhere to and are certified by the SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) which is less stringent, but still require much more environmentally friendly practices than non-certified sources. The last audit of certified timberland in 2006 showed that less than 16% of US forestland is sustainably certified and virtually …