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LOG & TIMBER FRAME HOMES |
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environmentally friendly wood — our renewable, sustainable, abundant, recyclable, biodegradable, energy efficient partner against global warming |
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| Wood - The Ultimate In Building Green | ||
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BUILDING
GREEN WITH WOOD
Did
you know that wood has the least environmental impact when compared
to steel and concrete in terms of both its manufacturing process
and its use inside a home? And did you know that because actively growing forests absorb
huge amounts of carbon dioxide and release clean oxygen, they
help fight global warming?
It
may be surprising to learn that North American forests cover about
the same amount of land as they did 100 years ago, even though 97%
of all homes are framed with wood and wood products and North Americans
use more wood per capita than anyone else in the world. This amazing
feat is due primarily to advances in agriculture (which have enabled
us to grow more on less land) and sustainable forest practices. According
to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, North American
forests expanded by nearly 10 million acres during the 1990s and
another two million acres between 2000 and 2005.* In the U.S. and
Canada, more than 225 million acres have been independently certified
as sustainable forests, an amount equivalent to more than twice
the size of California.
RENEWABLE•SUSTAINABLE•ABUNDANT
RECYCLABLE•BIODEGRADABLE
Today,
most major cities have wood recycling programs. Additionally, there
is an increasing trend to reuse architectural detailing or create
entirely new products from old, such as flooring made from wall
panels. Scrap wood can be chipped for particle board or other composite
products or mulched for landscaping or animal bedding. Since
wood is a natural resource, wood products that do end up in landfill
sites are biodegradable.
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LESS
ENVIRONMENTAL
A steel
wall requires three to six times more energy to extract, manufacture
and construct than a wall made of wood. Manufacturing a steel wall
also uses 25 times the amount of water as a wood wall and releases
three to six times more carbon dioxide.** Manufacturing concrete
generates two to three times more carbon dioxide than wood and five
times the solid waste.**
IMPACT FROM MANUFACTURING LESS
ENVIRONMENTAL
The Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial
Materials (CORRIM) compared the energy required to construct, maintain
and demolish homes framed with wood and steel in Minneapolis and
homes framed with wood and concrete in Atlanta. According to the
report:
IMPACT FROM CONSTRUCTION
ENERGY
EFFICIENT LIVING
Wood
can also be used to help meet overall energy-efficiency objectives
for heating and cooling, which represents about 45% of most utility
bills. Because wood's cellular structure contains air pockets that
limit its ability to conduct heat, it is naturally a better insulator
than other materials — 15 times better than concrete and 400
times better than steel.
SUSTAINABLE
FORESTS FIGHT
As
trees grow, they absorb carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas believed
to be a major cause of global warming. The carbon continues to be
stored as the tree grows until the wood eventually burns or decays,
thus keeping it out of the atmosphere. Sustainable
forests that are harvested and manufactured into building products
continue to store the carbon dioxide within the products. Meanwhile,
the forest regenerates with young trees that absorb even more carbon
dioxide — thus achieving a net reduction in global emissions.
As a result, the cycle of wood use and forest regeneration becomes
an important tool in the fight against global warming.GLOBAL WARMING |
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*Source: State of the World's Forests, 1997 and 2001, and the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005 **Source: Canadian Wood Council |
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