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New Green Building Guide Makes Case for Wood

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AUBURN, Calif.—As more people focus on creating ‘green’ buildings, a new guidebook makes the case for the only truly renewable building product: wood. The booklet, “The Wood User’s Guide to Green Building,” details the important role wood plays in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, underscores the energy efficiency of wood and shows how well wood rates when compared to other primary building materials.

In a time when sustainable practices are becoming more desirable, the booklet outlines the benefits of building with wood, including scientific data that shows how wood outperforms steel and concrete across a range of environmental performance criteria.

“Wood is truly the only building material that is renewable, recyclable and biodegradable,” said Robert Mion, marketing director for The Forest Foundation, which is distributing the guide. “This green building guide is an important resource for everyone, particularly as people try to make more environmentally sensitive decisions.”

Wood’s Sustainability Story

Some facts included in the guide:

• More wood is grown than harvested every year in California and, contrary to some assumptions, the state has nearly the same amount of forestland as it did 100 years ago.

• Building wall systems with steel or concrete can increase greenhouse gas emissions by 33 percent and 80 percent respectively.

• Not only is wood grown using natural energy from the sun, but more than 60 percent of wood processing is powered by wood-based biofuels, a much cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels.

• Trees remove carbon dioxide from the air, replace it with oxygen and store the carbon, helping to fight global warming. Even after trees are harvested, carbon continues to be safely stored in wood products like lumber and furniture for generations. In fact, about half the weight of wood is stored carbon.

• If from this point forward every new home built in the United States that would normally be framed in wood were instead framed in steel, the difference in energy consumption would be equivalent to operating a fleet of 950,000 SUVs, each driving 20,000 miles annually.

A 2005 study by the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials found that a wood-framed house outperformed steel and concrete houses across a range of environmental performance criteria. Steel and concrete required far more energy to create and caused more air pollution.

The booklet also provides an overview of various green building rating systems and independent sustainable forestry certification programs. Nearly 400 million acres of forestlands in North America are certified as well-managed and sustainable by third-party organizations.

The Guide briefly describes some of the general characteristics of the many green rating systems in use today. It focuses primarily on the steps California is taking in developing its green building programs, and also addresses the familiar LEED ratings established by the U.S. Green Building Council and the Green Globe ratings as developed by the Green Building Initiative. The guide notes the similarities and differences between the programs, particularly with regards to how wood is treated by each. The guide also points out only one popular green rating system, Green Globes, and incorporates Life Cycle Assessment, the most rigorous scientific methodology that can be applied to the selection of building materials and assemblies.

The Wood Users Guide to Green Building can be viewed online at www.calforestfoundation.org.

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