<div class="wp-caption alignleft" style="width: 200px"><p class="wp-caption-text">This town and the surrounding forest have benefitted from sustainable practices. (from wikipedia)</p></div>As we've previously discussed here on the blog, green is in! More than ever, people are looking for environmentally friendly alternatives to the products they use in their daily lives. Using sustainable wood products is an important part of this effort. The forests of our planet are our oxygen factories, and we can't live without them. Dwindling forests make for poor air quality, leave land open to being washed away by rainfall, and reduce the habitats of animals and humans.

Not using wood is an option, and if you want to go that route with your wine racks we have great metal wine racks available, including sideways racks that will display your wine labels. But many people strongly prefer the traditional look of wood, and for some applications there's no good substitute. So what is the environmentally conscious person to do?

<div class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 150px"><p class="wp-caption-text">Sustainable Forestry Initiative </p></div>In recent years, several non-profit agencies have formed to certify the sustainability of wood suppliers. Their goal is to ensure that forests will continue to supply our needs for wood products, oxygen, animal habitats, etc for the present and future. Various agencies have different standards for certification, but they all share the goal of keeping our natural resources sustainably available. You can make a statement to forestry companies and make a commitment to the environment by purchasing wood products that come from sustainable-certified forests.
Here at Vintage Cellars, most of our wood wine racks are made from materials that are certified by either SFI or FSC, two major agencies that certify forests as sustainable. Click here for a comparison of these two agencies (PDF). Most of our Vintner wine racks, Designer wine racks and Redwood wine racks as well as our commercial wine racks are made from wood that is certified by one of these agencies.
More information on sustainable forestry is available on SFI's site or you can get the Wikipedia overview here.