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Responsible Wood
In this time, it is important to be involved in a professional and responsible manner with the product wood. Naturally, we set high standards for our organization and our employees, but also high standards for the sustainable products we create.
Wood is a product that is easy to work with and suitable for many applications. It can be recycled and is biodegradable. However, the use of wood also has a disadvantage; the amount of trees that are cut down annually. If this happens in a careless way, the forest will hardly restore to its original state. An environmentally friendly choice is therefore important. Know where your wood comes from: a responsible or irresponsible managed forest.
Origin of Wood
Wood can come from a virgin forest or production forest. The primeval forest vegetation consists of various species of trees of various ages. This makes a primeval forest very attractive for many plants and animals. Most ancient forests are found in the tropics, in the form of tropical rainforests. But even in northern regions such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Russia (Siberia) and for other former Soviet republics you can find primeval forests.
Production forests are managed by people. Wood harvested in a production forest is more environmentally friendly than wood that has been harvested from intact natural forests. Forest management of production forests can be done in a responsible and sustainable way, not damaging flora and fauna. But there are production forests and plantations where the trees stand in rows, all of the same type and size. These trees are all planted at the same time or sown and harvested at the same time. These forests are unattractive for other plants and animals.
Sustainable forest management means that the forest is harvested selectively, only those trees are cut which are really useful. For this, a new tree is planted on the site or seedlings are given the opportunity to take the place of the felled trees. When that happens the right way, the richness of the forest is maintained.
Uipkes Wood Flooring is therefore against illegal timber and strives for an international- global approach of the problem and a legal ban for illegal timber at an European level. Preferably, the wood that is traded comes from certified and sustainably managed forests in Europe.
The Planing Process
All wood floors we supply are manufactured in our own planing mill. The raw wood is bought cut and dried from a regular supplier in the Netherlands. Before the wood is processed, we check whether the supplied wood has the right quality to be processed into a good floor product.
The planing process consists of three steps. In the first phase a raw wood board is planed clean on four sides ('calibrated'). Then we take a look which side has the finest quality wood. We verify if there are no defects in the wood such as fungi or dry spots. These are often not yet visible in the raw wood version. In the second stage, the raw boards are provided with tongue and groove on the long side: three tension grooves on the underside and a bevelled edge on the top side of the plank. Finally the boards to are shortened to specific lengths and the crosscut sides are provided with tongue and groove. After this we do a final check to see whether the planed boards are of the desired high quality.
