The end user and consumers miss the sustainability of the product.

I think they totally miss that element of using wood products versus

composites for plastics or steel, you know, things like that.

I think they just totally miss that.

Welcome to the Fine Home Building Pro Talk podcast, a regular discussion with building industry

professionals. This is Senior Editor Patrick McCone. Today I'm joined by Jeff Easterling, president of the Northeastern Lumber Manufacturers Association. You can find the Fine Home Building Pro Talk podcast and the original Fine Homebuilding podcast at Fine Homebuilding.com slash podcast. You can leave feedback and ask questions there too. Jeff, it is a pleasure to meet you. I'm surprised actually

our paths have not crossed before. It's true. We seem to be running in the same circles on

occasion. But just around each other somehow. Yeah, certainly glad to meet you and be here.

Thanks for your time. Can you please tell me about the Northeastern Lumber Manufacturers Association commonly referred to an LMA?

What do you guys do? How did it get started? And what are the companies that comprise the organization?

Sure, yes. You can tell why we go by Nelma, because that Northeastern Lumber Manufactures Association is a mouthful, right?

I want to look every time so I don't botch it.

So that's why we're commonly known as Nelma.

You'll hear a lot of people say that.

But the organization has a pretty rich history starting in 1933 as a result of actually the new deal from Roosevelt

as they needed an organization to try to set prices of all things back and after the Depression.

And so that's how Nelma was started on actually on Madison Avenue and New York City, of all places.

And, uh, but it morphed after that into really a trade group that represented the

northeastern softwood lumber industry, softwood being, uh, obviously the eastern white pine,

uh, the spruce, the balsam fur, manufacturers of lumber.

So that's its original history.

Now we do represent pretty much all of the softwood industry in the northeast, in the U.S., and the Great Lakes area.

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