Wood vs. Alternatives
» Energy Conservation
Energy Conservation
It's been on everybody's mind lately. More than ever, we need to practice conservation.
So use wood products, and feel good about it! Here are some reasons why:
Most fundamentally, wood is renewable. We can grow it, harvest and use it, and then grow some more.
The production of trees is powered by the sun. The forester's job is to give nature a hand, and then get out of the way. By using wood, we conserve energy - both today and in the future.
In contrast, producing steel, aluminum, plastic or concrete requires the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. From raw material extraction to final product, the necessary energy input is 70 times higher for a ton of aluminum than for a ton of lumber, 17 times higher for steel, and 3 times higher for brick or concrete blocks than for wood.
Wood is also a great insulator. Wood framed buildings hold more heat in the winter and coolness in the summer. Steel and aluminum framing are highly heat-conductive: heat is lost through metal at a far greater rate than through wood. Wood is also a superior insulator when compared to cinder blocks, concrete or brick.
And wood is its own source of energy. Lumber mills, for example, satisfy most internal power needs by combusting their own woody residues. Excess electricity is then sold to the public grid.
There are even power plants built exclusively to run on wood. California's biomass industry currently generates 675 mega-watts of clean energy, or enough to fuel 675,000 homes, from woody biomass material that would otherwise be tossed into landfills or burned out in the open.