Let’s face it. What with trying to make a living in increasingly hostile economic conditions, who needs to worry about climate change as well? Isn’t all the talk about how the use of wood helps to reduce climate change just a distraction from the business of selling wood? I’d like to suggest that the promotion of wood’s role in helping to reduce climate change is one of the biggest advantages we have and that we need to get smarter about how we make wood’s environmental benefits work for us. I also suggest that we should become more confident and assertive in doing this.
Make no mistake: competing materials are sharpening up their act and climbing as fast as they can onto the sustainability bandwagon. The steel industry claim steel is sustainable because it can be recycled. This is true on the face of it. Steel can be recycled but only by using vast amounts of energy. To recycle one tonne of steel takes as much energy as is used by the city of Doncaster in 24 hours.
There is no point in trying to counter such claims directly. Our audiences – architects, builders, developers and contractors – have no interest in witnessing a slanging match between competing materials. But there is a point in marshalling our arguments for using wood and deploying them simply and graphically. wood for good has started to do this with our Wood and Climate Change activity. We have developed two Powerpoint presentations with speakers’ notes which lay out the benefits of using wood clearly and factually. We hope to develop a range of other material which will enable the industry to promote wood’s role in reducing climate change consistently.
We plan to organise workshops for people to practise using this material and to encourage its use as widely as possible. I believe it is important that we bring some consistency to the information and statistics we are using to talk about wood and climate change. Consistency of message and frequent repetition are the keys to successful communication.
However, merely promoting wood’s role in reducing climate change is not enough. We know that our customers perceive wood as being difficult to specify and use, not least because of the shortage of contractors who have the knowledge to deliver projects that feature wood. Other perceptions, albeit misplaced, include issues surrounding durability, maintenance, fire and stability. We should not shrink from recognising these difficulties. They are genuine and need to be addressed. We should acknowledge that wood is a natural material and, as such, there needs to be an awareness among our customers of how wood should be handled, specified, detailed and where and when it is not appropriate to specify certain species.
Things are moving in our direction with the Code for Sustainable Homes and the requirement that, from 2016, all new houses must be zero carbon. The code has six levels and each level represents an increasing reduction in carbon emissions. Level 6 requires a 100% reduction in the Target Emission Rate and a house built to level 6 is deemed a zero carbon structure. Timber frame enables builders to meet different levels of the code less expensively than concrete so there is no excuse for builders to say that timber frame is a more expensive option.
The government’s new Strategy for Sustainable Construction declares that “we cannot meet our declared environmental targets without dramatically reducing the environmental impact of buildings and infrastructure construction; we have to change the way we design and build”. What better way to do this than with wood? As the materials debate moves from energy in use (the amount of energy used, say, to heat a house) to embodied energy (the amount of energy used to produce and transport a material), so our advantage as a building material will become clearer. It us up to us as an industry to capitalise on this advantage and to ensure that the concrete and steel industries do not pass themselves off as sustainable building materials.
The future belongs to wood!
