Cole Clark Environmental Statement September 2024
As of September 2024, 96% of timbers in all Cole Clark guitars are sustainable timbers.
Tone woods used by most North American and European guitar makers have evolved to be a mix of local timbers and specialist imported timbers largely from Africa and South America and Asia. These include the various Spruces, Western Red Cedar, Maples, Californian Redwood, various Ebonies, North American Maple, various Mahoganies and Koa.
Many of these have become endangered as world human population has expanded. It is easy to find the status of all these timbers. All you need to do is Google “Red List” and put in the common name for the timber you are wanting to know the status of. It became illegal to export Brazilian Rosewood logs in 1967. Indian Rosewood, after being listed on CITIES in 2017, has become exempt for instrument making when from a sustainable source in India. Only 7% of the original Brazilian Rosewood forests remain and 20% of other Rosewood species, as best as we can tell. Many other species, including various Mahoganies, are listed at vulnerable or endangered. Ebony, while once listed vulnerable, is now listed as sustainable. Ebony is relatively fast growing, and good work has been done in Cameroon by Madinta and Taylor guitars.
Spruce requires 250 year old trees to get two piece tops out of. The main source of Spruce for guitar makers is Sitka in Alaska. There is little remaining outside various stockpile from some companies. The species is not endangered, but the old growth timber is limited. When this runs out, guitar makers will start to make three piece tops.
The unfortunate thing about the Spruce situation is that the guitar industry uses very little. For example, the whole North American guitar industry uses only about 120 trees a year. The problem is most of these forests are clear felled for furniture and pulp. The guitar industry is swept along with the rest of the timber industry. It is the same for Indian Rosewood which was CITES listed in January 2017. This is why instrument making is now exempt from the CITES listing of Rosewood.
We now use European Spruce which comes from well managed forests. This Spruce has a slightly different sound to Sitka Spruce, and then Adirondak Spruce is different to both Sitka and European.
From the start, Cole Clark has made guitars that included many of these endangered timbers but at the same time we used the lessons learnt from guitar makers in North America and Europe and explored our own country, Australia. We looked for tone woods which are sometimes similar and sometimes unique to traditional tone woods. Sometimes they are the same species that are endangered in other parts of the world but sustainable when grown and harvested sustainably in Australia.
We have many models made from 100% sustainable timber, and we hope that people respond to these models, but we also make guitars with Spruce, Western Red Cedar and Rosewood, because that is what some people want. It is up to the person buying the guitar if they want sustainable guitars, or not.
20% of our tops are Bunya from plantations in Queensland, 53% of our tops are Australian Blackwood sustainably harvested from private farms around the Otway Ranges in Victoria and private land in Tasmania. 18% of our tops are Californian Redwood grown in Australia salvaged from fallen trees or plantations. The remaining tops are all sustainable and include Cedar Of Lebanon salvaged from fallen trees grown in Western Victoria. Our Huon Pine was recovered from a lake flooded in 1972 in Tasmania.
66% of our backs and sides are sustainable Australian Blackwood, 15% are sustainable Queensland maple which is from a plantation in Queensland, 9% is Silky Oak mainly from urban recovery. 10% of our back and sides come from European maple from trees grown in Australia.
With the exception of the necks of the Dual National models part made in China, all our guitar necks are made from sustainable Queensland Maple, sustainable Australian Blackwood, and Sustainable Honduran Mahogany from Fiji.
95% of our fingerboards are sustainable, made from River She Oak, Satin Box, Australian Blackwood, Ebony and Eucalyptus. 5% of our fingerboards are Rosewood, which is legal, but not sustainable as a total species.
We are not FSC certified at this point. Right now we can produce a guitar with sustainable timbers which do not appear on the endangered lists for the same price as the non-sustainable instruments. FSC certification would make the sustainable models considerably more expensive. We hope to go down the FSC road in the future but we do not want to link sustainability with lack of affordability.