No doubt many in the trade yearn for simpler times. The days when all a customer wanted was a particular species, in a particular volume and dimension, delivered on time and at the right price – albeit that this was probably unfeasibly cheap. Now that’s just the start of many customers’ and specifiers’ criteria when ordering timber. They also want to know if it’s verified legal or certified as originating from well-managed forest; and it might have to be a specific certification scheme.
From March 2013, importers must also comply with the EU Timber Regulation, which means backing timber and wood products with due diligence risk assessment, like the Timber Trade Federation’s Responsible Purchasing Policy, to minimise the danger of illegal material entering the supply chain.
There’s another acronym to deal with too; LCA (life cycle assessment). For a growing number of construction professionals and manufacturers, it’s not enough to prove that timber originated from a sustainable source. They want to know the entire environmental life story of all their materials and products; their carbon impact from the moment they’re harvested or dug out of the ground, to the moment they’re discarded, recycled or reused.
But before this seeming complexity prompts more wistfulness about the past, the good news is that there are bodies out there undertaking LCA initiatives on behalf of the industry. What is more, they claim, the new discipline could prove to be timber’s environmental ace in the pack in competing with rival materials.
One such organisation is The American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), which has commissioned what is billed as timber’s most ambitious LCA to date. And underlining the level of interest in the market, an AHEC presentation on it at the Carpenters’ Hall last week, attracted 80 people, including architects, other building professionals and timber companies.
The ‘cradle to [factory] gate’ LCA has been two years in drafting and is not quite complete, but it has already produced some valuable tools, ultimately for use by the industry. Notable among these is the study’s ‘ireport’ which includes a system for computer modelling the carbon footprint of US timber species in different dimensions delivered to any destination worldwide. Interestingly, this gives the lie to claims that timber shipped halfway round the globe cannot be eco-friendly. It shows transport is a relatively small component in terms of timber’s greenhouse gas emissions. Kilning is more significant and this finding, in turn, gives pointers for reducing carbon impact through specifying thinner lumber or adopting more energy-efficient, lower carbon kilning equipment.
AHEC is now also working with designers and manufacturers to incorporate its LCA into cradle to grave analyses. This is also useful for identifying environmental ‘hotspots’ in the production process, which the project partners could tackle through design tweaks or, again, using different timber types or dimensions.
Timber’s LCA performance is also one angle being used by Wood for Good in its campaign to persuade local authorities to adopt a Wood First rule in their planning guidelines (which got a very receptive hearing at Hackney Council last week.
So the past may have been simpler, but it didn’t have half the arguments we have today to make timber’s case as the pre-eminent raw material of our times.
