No other material can match wood’s unique benefits. It is light, strong, easy to work, affordable and good-looking. But, as sustainability and carbon reduction become increasingly important to all building activity, wood’s compelling environmental benefits are helping to make it today’s building material of choice:
- It is the world’s only naturally renewable mainstream building material.
- It is the only building material to provide third party verification of sustainability, through international forest certification programmes such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) and schemes such as the American Tree Farm System.
- It is reusable, recyclable, can be used as biomass fuel and is biodegradable.
- It has better insulation properties than other building materials.
- Growing trees remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and give off life-sustaining oxygen.
- Trees require less energy (and therefore CO2 emissions) to harvest and convert into finished products than any other construction material.
- Wood products store CO2 , keeping it out of the atmosphere while stimulating the expansion of managed forests, which absorb yet more CO2.