Portland’s airport hypes sustainable timber, but those lofty claims are more complicated than they seem

Last summer, after years of anticipation and marketing hype, Portlanders got to see what the first part of a $2 billion airport terminal renovation looked like.

A small forest of trees, some as high as two-story buildings, growing out of lush garden planters. Soft seating shaped like tree limbs and boulders. But what really grabs visitors' attention is the ceiling: intricately woven wood lattice looming over it all like a protective tree canopy.

The idea was to show Portland International Airport travelers what the Pacific Northwest is all about: forests, and the timber they produce.

“All of the wood here in the roof comes from within 300 miles of where we’re standing — sustainably harvested from 11 forestland nonprofit and tribal owners,” Curtis Robinhold, executive director of the Port of Portland (and an OPB board member), told OPB days after the terminal reopened. “We can tell you from this position where the wood came from, where it originated and where it was milled.”

But the truth is more complex. The terminal designers say it’s not possible to track the exact forests where they got most of their wood, so they only know where just over a quarter of the wood came from. “Sustainable forestry” is itself a subjective idea with different definitions, depending on who you ask. In the end, a closer look at the stunning PDX architecture that drew a U.S. president’s praise illustrates both lofty ambitions — and a sustainable timber industry that may not exist for a project this large.

Part of the challenge with the PDX terminal, port leaders and their architects say, is the complicated world of lumber, where raw logs travel through a string of mills and manufacturers that mix them in with other wood products, making it tough to trace what came from where.

“It was immensely difficult for them to do what they did,” University of Washington emeritus forestry professor Jerry Franklin said. “They made an extraordinary effort, and I give them a lot of credit for that.”

With an overall rise in demand for sustainably made products and construction, many organizations are shifting their focus to going green, and ensuring the public knows about it. Cases of “greenwashing” — when companies make misleading environmental claims — have also increased globally, pushing lawmakers to write policies regulating such statements, including in Oregon.

In terms of public infrastructure projects of this size, the terminal designers have prioritized local and sustainably made products. What’s less clear is whether those efforts live up to their public messaging.

We don’t know exactly where most of the wood came from

In the early spring of 2022, after a long line of speeches from local politicians, then-President Joe Biden took to a podium under a hangar at the Portland International Airport.

As airplanes taxied along the runway behind him, Biden thanked multiple lawmakers for their work on climate policy and highlighted his own accomplishments in infrastructure funding. Then he turned the topic to the airport terminal.

“Almost every single piece of wood being used was substantially harvested from local forests,” Biden said. “You can point to any beam, and the folks building it can tell you where it came from.”

It’s easy to see where Biden — or his speech writers — got that impression. The port has heavily emphasized its "farm-to-table" approach to sourcing wood for its new terminal across its website, noting that every piece of wood came from within 300 miles of the airport. That statement is based on where they purchased the wood — at mills in Oregon and Washington — but not where the wood was cut. In actuality, the port’s designers were able to trace 30% of all the terminal’s wood to 16 forest owners. They don’t have documentation showing which forests grew the other 70%.

“When you’re saying it’s coming within 300 miles, you’re not saying, ‘Here is every node that we’ve tracked down,’” said Paul Vanderford, director of wood markets at Sustainable Northwest, which partnered with the Portland-based architecture firm ZGF to source wood for the terminal.

Sustainable Northwest and ZGF say about 73% of the timber used was sustainably harvested, but there’s a lot of complexity behind that number. Staff say they personally verified the sustainability standards of the forests that provided about 16% of the wood — either by visiting the forests in person or reviewing their management plans.

The other 57% of the terminal’s wood came from mills certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, a global forestry accreditation program. FSC offers different labels for certain levels of sustainability. The airport’s mills used what’s called a “mixed credit” label, meaning those mills earned credits by purchasing wood from FSC-certified forests at some point in the past. Those credits allowed the mills to mix in other wood from sources that aren’t FSC-certified.

It’s a familiar concept in the energy world. People who pay extra to join Portland General Electric’s clean energy programs, for example, don’t know that the electrons that arrive in their homes specifically came from wind turbines instead of coal-powered plants — but they know that the amount of renewable energy they paid for was generated somewhere and added to the grid.

In the end, the terminal’s designers don’t know how much of its mixed-credit wood came from sustainably managed, FSC-accredited forests, and how much potentially came from forests following bare minimum forestry standards.

This sort of product-mixing was necessary, ZGF architect Jacob Dunn said, because mills that can handle the demands of a 9-acre airport terminal project just aren’t equipped to track exactly what wood came from where.

“Everything gets mixed up,” Dunn said. “All logs go into different piles. They create different products on the back end. So, it’s impossible to say that this wood that we bought came from this particular forest.”

Vanderford, Dunn and their colleagues asked mill owners to provide as much information as they were willing. Some owners worried that disclosing their wood sources would make them lose a competitive advantage. In Dunn’s view, encouraging higher levels of transparency pushed the limits on what was possible with a project of this size and creates demand for sustainable wood, even if every board cannot be tracked.

“We’re trying to build a demand for those mills that do want, actually, to disclose that information,” Dunn said. “We want to have that ability to navigate the supply chain.”

What does ‘sustainable forestry’ mean?

The term “sustainable” is often subjective, but there are some key practices that foresters and ecologists say could help a forest stay relatively healthy, even after part of it is logged.

“When you talk about sustainable forestry, the question always is, ‘What are you trying to sustain?’” Oregon State University forest policy professor emeritus K. Norman Johnson said.

In the past, Johnson said, timber industry leaders used the term primarily when discussing sustaining long-term wood production. In their eyes, wood is a renewable resource, so it’s all sustainable, regardless of where it came from. Nowadays, the phrase “sustainable forestry” usually goes beyond that: “Because, fundamentally, we’re trying to sustain the ecological processes while still producing wood.”

Those ecological processes include the overall structure and function of a natural forest: lush tree canopy shades animals and soils, branches provide places for birds to nest, dead stumps house insects and mushrooms. To retain those systems, loggers need to leave sections of trees behind, and they need to ensure those trees vary by age and species.

The PDX terminal’s project leaders categorized their wood sources into four categories with different levels of sustainability. The lowest level, called “A Better Clearcut,” is where most of the airport’s sustainable wood fell. It requires loggers to limit their clear-cut sizes to a maximum of 60 acres. They also need to allow trees to age up to 60 years before cutting.

“A longer rotation would be 80 years,” Franklin, the University of Washington emeritus forestry professor, said. “So, 60 years is better, but it’s not necessarily what we’d like. But it’s certainly better than the 40 years.”

Many industrial timber farms stick to the minimum legal requirements, all while they plant the same tree species in rows, heavily rely on herbicides, and clear cut trees every 40 years. It would have been easier and cheaper for the Port of Portland to primarily source its wood from these farms, or from regions outside the Pacific Northwest that can provide different types of lumber. Instead, the port had its designers focus their efforts on supporting small woodland owners and tribes as much as possible.

And while the terminal’s wood may not be as ecologically sourced as its proponents claim, it has still become a poster child for what is possible, showing other builders how much public support there is for this type of construction.

“It is encouraging sustainable forestry, and to me, that’s kind of the bottom line,” Johnson said.

Welcome to Oregon, behold our timber

Back in 2016, Paul Barnum, then the executive director at the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, or OFRI, had an idea: What if Portland’s airport terminal was largely built out of wood, instead of steel and concrete?

“I learned from my Willamette U. college buddy Bob Packard at ZGF that the Port is considering several projects to expand or upgrade structures at PDX, and there may be an opportunity to use advanced wood products,” Barnum wrote in an email to Robinhold, executive director for the Port of Portland.

He continued: “Our city and state have become a national epicenter of wood structures using mass timber, and it would be great to see mass timber used at PDX – a primary gateway into our state.”

OFRI and timber companies see the increased popularity of mass timber as a way to resuscitate Oregon’s flagging timber industry. It’s made by gluing smaller pieces of wood together to create larger structures, like beams, columns or panels. Mass timber structures can be just as strong as those made of more carbon-intensive concrete or steel. In the end, the PDX terminal became the largest mass-timber project of its kind in the world, according to designboom, an online magazine.

A subsequent meeting between the port and OFRI seemed to go well: “Thanks for the meeting,” Robinhold wrote a few weeks later. “It was good to talk with you as we think in our early stages about potential uses for wood in our Terminal Core project.

OFRI is Oregon’s tax-funded forest education institute that has acted as a de-facto lobbying arm of the timber industry, in some cases skirting legal constraints that forbid it from doing so, according to a 2020 joint investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive, Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica.

Although the idea for showcasing Oregon’s home-grown mass timber in its airport appears to have originated with OFRI, port leaders say they landed on wood through a more organic process.

“We really liked the concept of the wood for a number of different reasons,” the port’s projects officer Vince Granato said. “We asked the design team to help give us some options and it really grew from that.”

The port’s marketing focuses less on highlighting ways it propped up the local timber industry, and more on how it supported local tribes. When travelers arrive at the newly renovated airport, they’re quickly greeted by a line of murals showing tribes that provided some of the port’s wood: the Coquille Indian Tribe, the Yakama Nation, the Skokomish Tribe and the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians. Inside the terminal, a latticed wall has a carved wooden sign declaring its Douglas fir came from the Cow Creek tribes.

Tribes provided just about 13% of the terminal’s wood. A larger chunk — about 27% — came from timber companies that only followed minimum legal logging standards, among them Freres Lumber. The company provided the mass plywood panels used in the terminal.

Although its wood didn’t fall into any of the designers’ sustainability criteria, Freres has nonetheless piggybacked off the port’s sustainability messaging.

In a 2022 blog post on Freres Lumber’s website, vice president of sales Tyler Freres commends the terminal as “a prime example of how organizations are prioritizing sustainability goals and looking to hold construction teams accountable for sourcing materials from manufacturers using sustainable forest management practices.”

The post describes how most of Freres Lumber’s wood for the project came from trees salvaged from land that burned in 2020 wildfires, and extols the climate benefits of post-fire tree cutting.

Nevermind that most ecologists would not call that strategy beneficial for forest health. Just the opposite: Many scientists recommend against salvage logging in most cases, since it can interfere with natural ecosystem recovery and increase runoff and erosion, sending sediment into nearby rivers and streams.

In a statement, Freres defended his stance on post-fire salvage logging, and argued: “ALL wood fiber produced in Oregon is harvested sustainably and under strict regulatory review.”

Vanderford of Sustainable Northwest says he isn’t concerned that Freres Lumber and other industrial timber companies that contributed to the terminal are benefitting from the project’s sustainability claims.

“Everyone has differences of opinions,” Vanderford said. “A lot of the wood products industry is advancing a message that all wood is good, and they’re defending the integrity of that statement. I’m not here to debate that statement.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to note that Curtis Robinhold, executive director of the Port of Portland, is also an OPB board member.