ENVIRONMENTAL STATEMENT

Since our beginnings, under the leadership of our late president, Roger K. Conrad, we have held to the belief that good environmental stewardship is key to our success as a company. This conviction has put us in the forefront of the wood preserving industry. Wood is a renewable building material, and it saves energy when compared with other building materials. The longer wood lasts, the less the drain on our exhaustible metals and minerals -- and the more we reduce the pressure on our forests.

To further accomplish our commitment to the environment, we have embarked on a course of continuous improvement in our wood protection treatments. In 1990, we first added to our inventory of wood protection preservatives, ACZA (Chemonite^TM). It was a new adventure into the realm of innovative preservatives. The process took 6 times as long as CCA, resulting in all kinds of changes and added costs to our way of doing business. Not only did the process use less arsenic, but the preservative contained no chrome, thus, reducing the amount of listed hazardous ingredients and lessening the impact upon the environment.

During the same year, our first test charges of another new preservative, Timbor^TM (borates), containing no listed hazardous ingredients and low mammalian toxicity, were performed. Borates is a diffusible type preservative and does not fix to the wood cellulose as well as other waterborne preservatives. Its use is limited to being continuously protected from liquid water.

In 1993, we began treating with another revolutionary preservative known as ACQ (Preserve^TM) This was the first approved preservative for West Coast refractory species that contained no listed hazardous ingredients. Once again, the changes in production procedures and added chemical costs were far more than the market would bear, and we achieved limited marketing success.

However, our efforts are gaining momentum as the consumer, governmental agencies and other environmental groups have become more cognizant of arsenicals used in wood preservatives and their perceived harm to our environment.

In January of 2000, we became the first North American wood treater of Natural Select^TM (CBA), another environmentally friendly preservative, similar to ACQ, however, different in its co-biocide being lower in mammalian toxicity.

Most people have ignored the use of more environmentally friendly products in favor of cost; however, the time has come to review these costs in favor of our environment and the people that use them.