When you're installing a new wood floor in a customer's home, you're not just giving them a floor covering-you're storing carbon. That's why researchers from the University of Washington, Mid Sweden University and the U.S. Forest Service say wood products can be effective in the fight against climate change.
It all comes down to a fact most of us learn as kids. Trees actually breathe in the very stuff humans breathe out: carbon dioxide. Of course, other human building activities-like manufacturing steel and concrete-actually produce carbon dioxide in much larger amounts, while trees act as a natural environmental scrubber. Researchers say that if we used more wood building products instead of steel and concrete we could quadruple the amount of carbon we store in 100 years. While sustainably managed forests are essentially carbon-neutral, an increased use of wood products would mean making less steel and concrete for building construction.
"Every time you see a wood building, it's a storehouse of carbon from the forest," said Bruce Lippke, University of Washington professor emeritus of forest resources. "When you see steel or concrete, you're seeing the emissions of carbon dioxide that had to go into the atmosphere for those structures to go up." Lippke is lead author of a paper in the June issue of the journal Carbon Management that examines forest management and wood use as they relate to the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
Lippke and his co-authors have based their findings on a life cycle analysis they conducted. The analysis assesses environmental impacts for all stages of a product, including materials extraction, energy for processing and manufacturing, product use and ultimate disposal.
The researchers found that the best approach for reducing carbon emissions involves growing wood as fast as possible, harvesting before tree growth begins to taper off, and using the wood in place of products that are most fossil-fuel intensive, like concrete and steel. Still, Lippke and co-authors are not advocating all forests be harvested in this way. They caution that, even though older forests have reduced capability to sequester carbon, they still provide other countless ecological values.
