If I had been asked to write this article a decade ago, I must admit I would have found it extremely difficult to paint the panelboard industry in a positive light. Green it most certainly was not.

This was an industry that showed little respect for its main raw material – wood – or the environment in general. There was little control over raw materials, forest sources were sometimes not sustainable and all used wood in the UK was going to landfill.

Most production plants had little or no emission controls in place and fumes were simply released into the environment. Throw in the fact that accident rates were high and human safety was not properly regarded, and this was not a particularly great sector in which to work.

Fast forward 10 years and this industry has been completely reborn; it is a true environmental success story. Millions have been invested in state-of-the-art emission control systems at plants up and down the country, vastly reducing their impact on the environment.

New mindset

But it’s not just about the money we have spent: the entire mindset of the industry has also had to change. Time and thought have been invested in planning how to make best use of the sustainable resources, wood and people, that we have at our fingertips – and at the same time improve the sustainability of our industry.

Norbord operates three plants across the UK – in Stirlingshire, Inverness and Devon – as well as a facility in Genk, Belgium, and the progress it has made in health, safety and environmental matters is staggering.

While the industry can never eliminate 100% of risks, Norbord has been absolutely focused on improving health and safety and, overall, there has been a 90% reduction in accidents since 1996. The number of days lost to accidents has also been reduced by more than 80% during the five-year period, making Norbord one of the safest manufacturing companies in our industry.

But I don’t wish to steal all of the credit for Norbord – all of the UK’s chipboard, MDF and OSB plants have improved beyond recognition, so there has been an industry-wide appreciation of the importance of environmental and health and safety issues. The Wood Panel Industries Federation (WPIF) has played a key role by bringing all the main players together, but the individual businesses all recognised that a responsible industry is an efficient industry – and an efficient industry is a sustainable industry.

&#8220The days of wood being wasted have well and truly gone. We are now the fourth largest recycling industry in the UK and improvements are continuing to be made year on year”

CO2 emissions

We are undoubtedly an energy intensive industry, but we have, through the WPIF, agreed to reduce our fossil fuel use by roughly 10% to help the government achieve its CO2 reduction and climate change targets. It is recognised that we have gone further than many other industries to derive renewable energy – we already generate approximately 50% of our needs from biomass, which would otherwise be going to landfill.

The UK’s wood-based panel producers currently consume 90% of the available recycled wood and there is capacity for production to increase as more wood becomes available. The one most critical advantage that the panel producers have over other intensive industries is the raw material, wood, which is both truly renewable and sustainable.

The days of wood being wasted have well and truly gone. We are now the fourth largest recycling industry in the UK and improvements are continuing to be made year on year. There is little doubt we are leading the way in dealing with the national waste issue. The wood-based board industry is the second largest consumer of UK-sourced wood and, in total, we consume nearly 4.4 million tonnes (green) of wood fibre.

Even post-consumer wood is recognised as a resource and, with at least 50% of chipboard now post-consumer, this has enormous environmental benefits. During their growth stage, trees absorb CO2, hence wood is a carbon store: 1m3 of wood used in the building sector can reduce CO2 emissions from fossil fuels by up to 1.1 tonnes. If 100,000 more houses were built per year with wood products substituting for other materials, CO2 emissions would be reduced by three million tonnes.

The beauty of this is that wood panel manufacturing locks the carbon in wood, which would otherwise have been going to landfill, and prevents its release into the environment for another 50 years or so.

The MDF industry is probably unique in that it is based on residues from another industry. Without selling its residues to MDF producers, the sawmill industry wouldn’t exist on the large scale of today.

We buy what are essentially pre-consumer residues which in the past were simply disposed of by sawmills – and recycle them into products which are FSC-certified, guaranteeing to the consumer through independently-verified means that the wood comes from sustainable, managed sources.