Wood: the Pluses, the Minuses, and the Neutrals

Wood: the Pluses, the Minuses, and the Neutrals



Is wood good? Wood is all around us from forests all the way to the chair you sit in to eat dinner. Wood is a necessary product that we as consumers have relied on for years. Believe it or not there is a lot more that goes into the production of wood and paper products. We will be diving deeper into the process of bringing wood from a forest to lumber, building with wood, and the overall question if wood is good. By the end of this blog, I hope that you can confidently tell someone if wood is good. 

For a lot of people, we think that wood gets cut down from a forest and is chopped up into perfect pieces and brought straight to the store; but this isn’t the case. A lot of thought is put into the process of trees being cut down. Selection harvests are very popular for picking specific tree groups to cut down based on size, species, ect. This ensures that trees are being harvested every 40-50 years. Clear-cutting is also popular. This involves cutting down a whole area of fully grown trees. These forms of harvesting can allow growth to continue while trees are being harvested. 

Tree production and harvesting is not wasteful at all! Not one chip of wood goes to waste. After the trees are cut down they are transported to the milling. While milling you may be thinking that a lot of the scarps that aren’t converted to lumbar are thrown away. BUT NO! 36% of wood products don’t make it to lumbar and then are converted into paper or pulp like wood chips. Some mills additionally use the pulp and chips as biofuel for their equipment. This cuts back on fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere. 

Building with wood is super beneficial and cost effective! When looking at the Life Cycle Assessment of buildings, a lot of the impacts come down to the “use” phase. This is looking closely at heating, air conditioning, and lighting. Wood has a higher insulation rate than other materials like steel and concrete due to its cellular structure. This means it takes less energy to maintain heating and cooling. Wood can also help regulate humidity. Wouldn’t that be nice on a humid summer day! Take it from one of the three little pigs, out of all the materials he chose WOOD, that has to mean something! Wood is also very biodegradable which is helpful for our environment and landfills.. When thinking about different forms of building material like concrete and steel, they take longer to break down when discarded. If wood isn’t helping our environment enough, it also replenishes the soil when it degrades. Other materials for building such as concrete and steel actually admit 15% of the world CO2 emission. 


Why do people always say that trees help our environment. Well I can tell you that! It's because they store carbon dioxide. We have learned that trees take carbon out of the atmosphere and convert it to biomass. Trees store this carbon in their tree trunks. This carbon will stay in the trees until it dies or is cut down. Once they die or are cut down, the carbon is released back into the atmosphere. With this carbon being stored in wood is helping climate change. In Europe alone, wooden buildings have the potential of sequestering 420 million metric tons of CO2 over the next 20 years (Carbon Herald)! Imagine if we switched how much carbon dioxide could be taken out of the atmosphere. 

Now that we have looked at wood through harvesting, construction material, and aiding in the removal of CO2 in the atmosphere, are you confident with an answer to my question? What do you think, is wood good? 










References 

Wood Moisture and What You Can Do About It

https://www.wagnermeters.com/moisture-meters/wood-info/wood-moisture-what-to-do/ 

How Buildings Made of Wood Can Help Climate Change

https://carbonherald.com/how-buildings-made-of-wood-can-help-fight-climate-change/ 

Lesson 13, Forest to Lumbar,  BBE 1002, UMN 

Lesson 17, Is Wood Good?,  BBE 1002, UMN


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