Since its re-launch in 2011, Wood for Good has become increasingly pro-active, now engaging with multiple stakeholders, via both the media and direct participation in key initiatives and programmes.
Today we focus on much more than general awareness raising, designed to fuel timber demand, and aim for tangible outcomes where we can see results and returns on our effort.
To this end, we are running two very key projects this year.
First is the Wood First Roadshow, our travelling engagement with industry and policy makers. Last year, our Wood First campaign helped propel Wood for Good onto the national stage. It generated significant interest among a large number of local authorities and other organisations about how timber can help create more sustainable environments and communities.
The level of interest generated was so significant that this year we’re holding a series of nationwide seminars for local authorities’ planning, sustainability and procurement teams, showcasing the ways in which timber can help deliver more sustainable outcomes for all of them.
We will be joined on the road by the Central Point of Expertise for Timber Procurement (CPET), the government backed body which delivers best practice knowledge sharing on sustainable timber procurement in the public sector. It will run free procurement workshops and together we’ll be educating hundreds of key local authority decision makers on the benefits of using wood.
While it is unlikely we’ll ever have a pure ‘Wood First’ rule in government procurement, as our peers in France, Slovenia and Canada, to name but a few, do, many councils and other organisations have realised that, as environmental criteria for buildings and materials get ever more stringent, timber is increasingly seen as the de facto solution for many scenarios.
To help ensure this, however, we need a reliable data set to back up the claims and this is where our Wood First Plus initiative comes in.
The advent of Building Information Modelling (BIM) and its rapid adoption in the public and private sectors, is symptomatic of construction’s increasing tilt towards data usage.
Under the spotlight to deliver more sustainable projects, statistics-backed evidence on all aspects of construction materials’ performance, environmental and other credentials is increasingly seen as essential to prove they are viable and acceptable options.
Without the ability to prove Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) credentials, for instance, amid a host of other data, materials risk being left out of designs.
The timber industry has been woefully complacent in publishing this data for target customers and audiences. Without it, the natural claims to sustainability we make are worthless. The lack of a single, credible go-to point for data on timber’s sustainable credentials is the most cited problem would-be users have in specification.
In this context, our Wood First Plus project is of critical importance to the entire UK industry.
Our aim is to create a generic database of both LCA and BIM data to give specifiers the hard evidence they need to make wood a first choice.
Doing this on a company-by-company basis is both expensive and, as feedback has shown, a challenging approach for customers. By working together on a collaborative, multi-stakeholder project we can collate the data on behalf of the whole industry and make it free for end users.
As ever, we need the continued support of the industry to ensure projects like this can continue to happen. After all, Wood for Good is your campaign and exists solely to benefit your business.
