Environmental Stewardship

PRACTICING SUSTAINABLE FORESTRY

As North America’s largest private timberland owner, we've been growing, harvesting and regrowing forests for a very long time — ensuring our customers have access to a renewable supply of wood while protecting the other important benefits forests provide. Today, we plan our sustainable forest management activities on at least a 100-year horizon, sometimes mapping as far out as 200 years to ensure our forests last forever.

• 1922: Weyerhaeuser donates 5,000 acres of forest for Washington state reforestation experiments.
• 1925: We advocate for legislation to encourage reforestation after harvest — an uncommon practice at the time.
• 1937: We begin research into sustainable-yield forestry, which ensures harvesting does not diminish the forest's ability to provide timber volume in the future.
• 1938: We are one of the first companies to successfully grow and plant tree seedlings. From this effort, a new crop was born, and Weyerhaeuser's tree-planting era began.
• 1941: We establish the first certified tree farm in the United States on 200,000 acres of harvested and fire-burned land in Washington state.
• 1961: We harvest our first crop of second-growth trees, establishing the pattern of harvest and restoration that has become the basis of our sustainable forestry practices.
• 1986: We plant our 2 billionth seedling in the blast zone of Mount St. Helens, marking the completion of a massive restoration effort in which we planted 18 million seedlings by hand following the 1980 eruption.
• 1994: We hold town hall meetings in Washington and Oregon attended by more than 2,000 people, who raised ideas, asked pointed questions and leveled criticism at the company. These public meetings were instrumental to the integration of more extensive environmental applications into our management practices.
• 2006: We become one of the first companies to certify our timberlands to the Sustainable Forestry Initiative® Forest Management Standard, a third-party sustainable forestry certification.
• 2013: We achieve 100 percent certification of our timberlands to third-party sustainable forestry standards.
• 2020: We launch our 3 by 30 Sustainability Ambitions to grow our positive impact in three areas where we play an important role and are uniquely positioned to make a meaningful difference — climate action, sustainable homes and rural communities — by 2030.

Today, we continue to certify 100 percent of our forests to the SFI® Forest Management Standard. We plant more than 100 million seedlings each year in our harvested sites, and we are transparent about our harvesting and planting metrics.

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SUPPORTING BIODIVERSITY

Our forests are much more than timber. They are thriving, resilient ecosystems that we help steward. All the living things in a forest — from the mightiest trees to the tiniest microbes — interact with each other and with the soil, water and air to form complex ecosystems that support a wide range of plant and animal communities.

The forests we manage host hundreds of native vertebrate species, including large mammals such as deer, elk, cougar, black bear and bobcat, as well as a tremendous diversity of birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, native fish and other aquatic species. Each of these species needs something different from their habitat, including different forest age classes and structures, and other important features such as healthy riparian areas. Since our millions of acres of timberlands contain a range of forest ages and structures, along with protected areas around streams, wetlands and special habitat features, these forests support a high level of biodiversity.

To preserve and protect the ecosystem balance, we are constantly taking the biodiversity pulse of all the land we own and manage. Our assessments, which include collecting and analyzing species occurrence data and monitoring for the presence of threatened or endangered species, guide and inform our implementation of forest management activities, as well as our habitat conservation and species management plans. Practices we implement to support biodiversity include leaving buffers along riparian areas, surveying sites for species occurrences prior to harvesting and thinning activities, refraining from harvest during certain sensitive times for animal species, and helping create specific habitats using prescribed burns.

Because we sustainably manage our forests, we can simultaneously deliver both renewable fiber to the market and a myriad of other ecosystem services — such as clean water and recreation opportunities — to surrounding environments and communities.

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Improving Conservation Outcomes 

Ensuring our forests provide habitat features that help us support at-risk, sensitive, threatened and endangered species is a core component of our environmental stewardship. We create and manage critical habitat by implementing best management practices on the lands we own and manage in the United States and the lands we manage in Canada. In the U.S., we participate in multiple conservation-focused programs, including conservation easements and agreements, mitigation banking, formal Habitat Conservation Plans, and similar arrangements with the federal government. In Canada, we work with the federal and provincial governments to develop, deliver and implement recovery strategies for species at risk as required by the Species at Risk Act.

Combined with our sustainable forest management practices, conservation easements and other local agreements can enhance the long-term stewardship and protection of wildlife habitat, biodiversity and recreational access. These partnerships are made with a variety of groups and organizations, and they allow us to continue managing our forest resources, which helps protect the economic benefits working forests create. Habitat Conservation Plans in the U.S. and Species-specific Recovery Plans in Canada provide specific guidance on the recovery and enhancement of habitats for threatened and endangered species. We participate in more than 50 conservation agreements and collaborative efforts that address specific habitat needs of at-risk or sensitive species across our timberlands. In addition to conservation agreements and easements, we currently operate 16 mitigation banks and projects, primarily in the U.S. South. Authorized through the U.S. Clean Water Act, mitigation banking allows us to set aside certain areas of our timberlands to preserve, enhance or restore a wetland, stream or other habitat area to compensate for development by another entity in a similar nearby ecosystem. Mitigation banks are regulated and approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a consortium of federal, state and local agencies.

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CONTRIBUTING TO CLEAN WATER 

Our forests are critical for providing clean water to communities in our watersheds. The trees, plants and soil absorb rain and snowmelt, then filter and slowly release clean water into the many streams, rivers and groundwater systems on our lands. From harvesting to road building, our sustainable forestry practices safeguard water quality by maintaining our forests' ability to capture and filter water — for people, fish and countless other organisms.

Because our forests rely on natural precipitation (rainwater and snow) to grow, our company’s measurable impact on water use is limited to our wood products manufacturing sites and offices, where water is either recycled or treated on-site, evaporated while products are drying or delivered to a local, publicly owned treatment facility. Even with this minor amount of water use at our mills, we continue to stay focused on reducing water use wherever possible.

We recognize that water risks are a global challenge. Through internal analyses and tracking, we manage water risk at the site level. Based on the World Resources Institute Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, none of our Wood Products mill locations or U.S. timberlands overlap with areas of extremely high water risk. We conduct this analysis of water risk when new locations are brought into our portfolio, and we periodically revisit our companywide analysis to evaluate whether water risk has changed.

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Storing Carbon

Sustainably managed forests are a critical part of climate mitigation. As our millions of acres of forests grow, they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it as carbon in their trunks, limbs and roots, as well as in the soil. After our trees are harvested and made into long-lived wood products, much of their carbon remains stored for the life of those products. After harvest, we plant millions more trees, which immediately begin absorbing more CO₂ from the atmosphere, and the next round of wood products stores more carbon yet again — all part of an amazing sustainable cycle.

Our managed forests mature quickly and are often able to sequester more carbon than unmanaged forests through faster, continuous rotations, all while maintaining a vast pool of carbon across the forest landscape.

When logs are made into wood products used in buildings, the carbon in those wood products is stored for the life of the building. Wood products also require less energy to manufacture than other non-renewable building materials such as steel and concrete, resulting in fewer greenhouse gases being emitted. Our Carbon Record provides a detailed accounting of the carbon that is sequestered by our forests and wood products.

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Making Better Energy Choices

We meet more than two-thirds of the energy needs in our manufacturing facilities by using by-products such as bark, sawdust, chips and shavings as fuel. This approach helps reduce our reliance on nonrenewable fossil fuels and our overall environmental impact.

We strive to be a leader in energy efficiency, independence and sustainable, cost-efficient operations. Our Energy Strategy Team leads the planning and implementation of the energy strategy companywide, while at the site level, we work to reduce the amount of energy it takes to manufacture our products by focusing on energy efficiency improvements. In addition, we integrate greenhouse gas considerations into our capital-planning processes to ensure necessary resources are allocated to reducing our carbon footprint.

We also play a role in providing renewable energy solutions to the market. Our timberlands provide an important land base for renewable energy production, such as wind and solar power. And we supply other mills, companies and utilities with woody biomass used to produce renewable energy.

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Decreasing Our Emissions

To keep global temperatures from rising, the business community must continue to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As a company, we continually seek to decrease our greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants such as carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds.

Between 2000 and 2020, we reduced our total greenhouse gas emissions by 57 percent, and in 2021 we set new GHG emission reduction targets that align with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. These ambitious targets include reducing our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 42 percent and our Scope 3 emissions by 25 percent per ton of production by 2030, measured against a 2020 baseline.

To achieve these goals, we are focused on improving energy intensity in our mills and investing in cleaner-burning machinery and upgrades to emission-control systems. Additionally, we are working to decrease emissions in our Timberlands through fuel-switching and other non-capital improvements where feasible.

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Making the Most Of Every Tree

We strive to use as much of each log that enters our manufacturing facilities and continually seek new outlets for our manufacturing by-products and used equipment.

The primary products we produce are solid lumber, wood panels and engineered wood products. Wood shavings, sawdust, chips and bark — by-products created during the manufacturing process — are sold or delivered to downstream customers who make other useful and essential products such as toilet paper, diapers, paper, cartons, boxes, bags, landscaping mulch and more. On average, 99 percent of our wood by-products are used to create other products or to generate energy.

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Responsible Wood Procurement

On average, we source about 40 percent of the wood used to make our products from our own SFI-certified forests, about 20 percent from other sustainably managed certified forests, and the remaining 40 percent from noncertified forests, which are typically small, family-owned forests. Whether wood comes from a sustainably managed certified forest or not, we ensure all the fiber we purchase and use to make our products is from legal, noncontroversial and responsible sources.

Our approach to responsible sourcing is guided by our Wood Procurement Policy and our certification to the SFI Fiber Sourcing and Certified Sourcing standards. This approach includes avoiding controversial sources of wood, positively influencing the forest practices of the landowners we buy logs from through actions such as requiring best management practices for protecting water quality, the promotion and conservation of biodiversity, requiring the use of trained loggers and sharing sustainable forestry information with landowners.