AQCI : One of our early tactics had been to try and get the city of Asbury Park to use only certified wood, but the suppliers couldn’t compete with the conventional supply of Timber Holdings,Ltd. (THL,a top importer of uncertified ipê and other tropical hardwoods).

We also got in touch with another company,called Aquatic Cellulose, which was advertising their sales of wood logged from beneath the surface of the Tucurui dam impound lake. The Tucurui dam was flooded in 1985,creating one of the largest ecological catastrophes in history, flooding 600,000 hectares of primary tropical rainforest, submerging perhaps millions of species of unique life forms never to be seen on Earth again.

Aquatic Cellulose put a new twist on the disaster – by logging the submerged dead trees and selling the timber, they are offsetting logging in living forests.

Aquatic couldn’t compete with THL because they sell uncertified ipê, but at the 11th hour THL and Aquatic struck a deal. Aquatic would supply THL with all their best wood and THL would use part of that for the Asbury boardwalk project which is part of Atlantic City's famous Board Walk, thus giving Aquatic a “showcase” project.

Rainforest Relief relaxed and moved on to other campaigns. In a final twist, Aquatic Cellulose was not be able to supply wood to THL, because of problems with contractors in Brazil who prevented any wood from getting to the US. So to solve this problem, Aquatic bought the company in the Amazon and is now able to get wood to the US.

http://www.rainforestrelief.org/documents/200...Report.pdf