Can Building with Wood Trim Carbon Emissions?

By Lloyd C. Irland

It stands to reason that if we can replace steel and wood in buildings with locally produced wood, we can reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere. But calculating how much difference it makes is, as the Grinch would say, “complicatacious.”

With support from the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation, a group of partners, Local Wood Works, has been conducting meetings and outreach to gain more users for locally produced wood. The accompanying charts were used in two of those sessions.

It’s easy to estimate net carbon ‘C’ emissions from producing a ton of varying materials (See chart) This is interesting, but nobody builds a house of 100% aluminum or brick. And a ton of wood does not replace a ton of aluminum. Recycling the metals makes a huge difference, and in fact metal studs are usually made of recycled raw material.

Concrete and steel construction shows far higher Can Building with Wood Trim Carbon Emissions? lifetime ‘C’ emissions and energy usage than wood (See chart ) – although interpreting these numbers would require knowing a lot of details. Without a complete bill of materials in a house, it is impossible to say how switching materials would affect the carbon burden of building it.

But we do know one thing: over a lifetime, the effect on carbon depends on where the house is built: location, location, location. ‘C’ emissions from commuting alone, 45 minutes each way, will far exceed the ‘C’ emissions from building the house.

Emerging wood-based engineered materials show great promise for displacing concrete and steel in at least some applications, and the concrete producers are getting nervous enough to be challenging the arguments for wood’s environmental superiority. Expect the battle of the dueling scientists to continue.

[Data from Jim Bowyer, Dovetail, Inc., 1997]