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Collins Pine CompanyCollins Pine Company on NBC Nightly News. April 16, 2008—A private California logging company has figured out how to go "green," working with nature instead of against it. Location: Chester, CA *Sierra Nevada Region North: Plumas County Contact: 503-417-7755 for general product information, or contact product specialists; Forest Manager Jay Francis jfrancis@collinsco.com 530-258-4401 Collins Pine, a family-owned wood products company begun in 1855, practices sustainable un-even age harvest of primarily single-tree selection that integrates timber management with wildlife, watershed and community health objectives. Collins Pine owns and manages its 295,000 acres of forest in California, Oregon and Pennsylvania in accordance with the protocols and “total ecological integrity of the forest” criteria of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). A founding member of the FSC, Collins Almanor Forest in Chester was the first privately owned forest FSC-certified by independent third-party Scientific Certification Systems Forest Conservation Program. Collins Pine produces lumber, FSC-certified and trademarked CollinsWood and Collins Pine FreeForm particleboard and veneer. CollinsWood is used in such varied products as Berkeley Mills cabinets and furniture, Venture Snowboards, and contributed LEED credits to the award-winning design of the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, Oberlin College, Ohio. Wally Reed, the company's first forest manager and now retired described the elegant math of sustainability in timber harvest. "We developed a forest inventory system that tracks the growth of the forest through 576 one-acre plots. This enables us to remove the high-risk trees and leave the healthy ones." The results? When logging started in 1941, Collins had approximately 1.5 billion board feet of standing inventory. “Today, after removing enough timber to build over 133,000 average-sized homes, the same acres still hold 1.5 billion board feet of timber.” In March 1996 it was one of only five U.S. companies (and the only forest products company) to receive the Sustainable Development Award from the President's Council on Sustainability, and it has also been awarded the Green Cross Millennium Award. Jim Quinn, president and CEO of Collins, worked with Paul Hawken, a founder of The Natural Step (TNS) to become one of the first U.S. companies to formally adopt TNS sustainability principles and practices international guidelines. Practicing sustainability in its manufacturing operations as well, Collins Pine uses surplus forest biomass (more than that needed to replenish soils) to power its cogeneration plant at its sawmill and manufacturing facility in Chester, CA. It produces enough electricity and heat for its own operations and to sell to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E), which then distributes up to six megawatts per hour during peak periods to homes and businesses in northern California. See Heat and Energy: Cogeneration Collins Pine corporate culture also considers a healthy forest itself as a product, allowing extensive use of their lands by the public for education and recreation, often creating innovative partnership models with both. When new Forest Manager Jay Francis noticed that a busy highway bisected an old Pacific Crest Trail Association (PCTA) interpretive trail through the Collins Almanor Forest, he worked with a variety of partners to improve safety at the highway crossing and build new trails on 40 acres that Collins Pine conserved in perpetuity for education and recreation -earning Collins Pine the PCTA’s first ever Partnership Award given to a business. For more about:
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