Domestic Group Warns Importers of Substandard Brazilian Plywood, Seeks Court Injunction
A domestic industry association seeks a federal court injunction that could strip certifications from Brazilian plywood and render imports of plywood from Brazil that bear the certification illegal under the Lanham Act. The U.S. Structural Plywood Integrity Coalition says two certification bodies that operate in Brazil are allowing their stamp to be applied to substandard structural plywood, purportedly as evidenced by testing that shows high failure rates in Brazilian structural plywood certified to meet industry standard PS 1-09.
The trade group filed June 5 for an injunction from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida that would revoke the PS 1-09 certificates issued by Timber Products Inspection (TPI) and PFS Corporation (PFS-TECO) to 34 plywood plants in southern Brazil. “This would expose all importers or resellers who continue to sell Brazilian plywood with PS 1-09 grade stamps to potential liability for false advertising under the Lanham Act,” the coalition said in a letter to industry. “If an injunction is issued, any reasonably prudent importer or reseller of Brazilian plywood should quarantine that product until the PS 1-09 stamps are removed.”
The letter “strongly” recommends “that all U.S. importers or resellers of Brazilian PS 1-09 plywood stop importing structural plywood from Brazil and quarantine whatever they have in inventory in the U.S.” It says the “off-grade” Brazilian plywood imports accounted for 6% to 10% quarterly of structural plywood consumed in the U.S. “All of this off-grade plywood bears the licensed grade stamps of either TPI or PFS-TECO,” the letter said.
“The American Plywood Association did significant testing of Brazilian plywood in mid-2018 that found 100% failure rates,” according to an FAQ released by the domestic coalition. “The plaintiff coalition also collected its own samples of Brazilian structural plywood that generated high failure rates in laboratory testing at Clemson University.”
International Accreditation Service (IAS), which oversees the ability of TPI and PFS-TECO to issue certifications, was originally also a defendant in the U.S. Structural Plywood Integrity Coalition’s lawsuit but settled “last week” after mediation, the coalition said in a June 10 news release. An IAS news release June 9 does not mention the settlement but announces it will subject TPI and PFS-TECO to additional scrutiny in upcoming reassessments of their accreditations. The accreditation body will also up the frequency of all assessments of certification bodies that certify plywood from Brazil, it said.