Wood: the Good, the Bad, and the "Neutral"

Wood is good!

When considering all of the potential uses of wood, from making paper to building your house, wood is a great natural resource. One of the biggest upsides of wood use is the fact that in many cases wood is important in the carbon cycle, and when left to its own devices often lead to a carbon neutral impact on the environment. According to an article by Sustainability Run, during a tree's 20-50 year lifespan they can sequester an average of 13 to 50 kg of carbon each year. This equates to large amounts of carbon removed from the environment when thinking of entire forests doing this. The tree then holds this carbon for years until it is either decomposed or used as fuel. Wood is also much cheaper to use in building vs. cement as a 2x4 from home depot costs $7.35 right now, which equates to about 82 cents per pound, whereas cement goes for 2-3$ per pound. Another really nice thing about wood is that throughout the whole process from removal to manufacturing of the lumber or other wood products nearly 100 % of the tree is used in some way! There are not many processes that have this rate of success in their creation.

Wood is bad!

Although there are many things about wood that make it a great resource, like everything, it has its downfalls. One of the major issues with wood is that no matter how much carbon the tree is able to sequester, at some point that carbon will be released back into the atmosphere. The biggest issue is that if another tree is not planted to replace the removed one, once the carbon is released back into the atmosphere there is not another tree to remain carbon neutral, which can lead to a carbon debt. Large scale removal of trees caused by forest fires is also a big problem. The issue is so much carbon is released into the atmosphere during these fires and is sometimes almost impossible to recover from in a lifetime due to the time it takes for the vegetation to come back. Another issue with wood is the fact that although we can use it for construction, there is still a lot of emissions of carbon from the machines that create the lumber as well as those that make the building.

Wood in neutral!

Like many things in the world today wood is a complex topic with no clear right or wrong answer to the efficacy of its use. It is not inherently bad that we remove trees from the environment in order to utilize the wood as in most cases the trees are replaced. It also is not inherently good that we replace the trees that are cut down. For instance, in plantation forests we severely disrupt the environment by creating monocultures are drastically decrease the biodiversity of the area. However, they are also much more efficient than the natural forest and allow for us to disrupt much less land.