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Increasingly people are recognizing wood is the best environmental choice for buildings of all types from single family homes to hockey arenas and offices. Wood has long been the preferred choice for North American home construction, recognized for its aesthetic appeal, performance and versatility. Over 95% of North American homes are wood frame construction.
In today’s environmentally conscious world, wood maintains its preferred status with builders and homeowners. Wood is the only major building material that is renewable. Wood uses less energy and produces less air and water pollution than steel and concrete. It is the first choice of those who want to minimize the environmental footprint of a building.
Using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), approach to evaluating different options for building construction demonstrates wood’s natural advantage. A LCA measures the impact of using different materials by looking at the environmental impacts at each stage in the lifecycle of a building product from resource extraction through manufacturing, transportation and installation and maintenance through to final disposal by quantifying energy and resource use and environmental emissions.
When the ATHENA Sustainable Materials Institute compared the environmental effects of an office building constructed of wood, concrete or steel, the wood building had the lowest total energy use, the lowest greenhouse gas emissions, the lowest air pollution index, the lowest solid wood waste, and the lowest ecological resource use index.
A September 2004 report concludes that wood is one of the most environmentally sensitive building materials for home construction – it uses less overall energy than other products, causes fewer air and water impacts and does a better job of the carbon “sequestration” that can help address global warming.
The research showed that steel framing used 17 percent more energy than wood construction for a typical house built in Minnesota, and concrete construction used 16 percent more energy than a house using wood construction in Atlanta. In addition, in these two examples, the use of wood had less global warming potential, with steel at 26 percent more and concrete at 31 percent more.
This $1 million study was prepared by the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials (CORRIM) a non-profit corporation of 15 research universities. It was published in the Journal of Forest Products and is the first major update on this topic since a 1976 report by the National Academy of Science.
By using wood from BC’s sustainably managed forests, builders and owners can be sure they have made a decision that supports our economy and our environment.
For more information about wood properties, design and environmental performance see these web sites:
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