Most wood products have negative carbon footprints, says a recent study. This means that building or furnishing a home or office with wood products instead of other materials serves to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

This is what a study funded in part by the US Forest Service Wood Education and Resource Center found.

                       Above: Wooden table created by Fern Studios

Now, manufacturing any product results in the release of carbon dioxide. This is called the product’s carbon footprint. In general, the more energy that goes into the manufacturing process, the more carbon is released.

“The carbon footprint of a product can be calculated by measuring and categorizing all of the energy and other inputs and outputs,” said Adam Taylor of the University of Tennessee.

When manufacturing wood into products, the wood waste generated is often used for energy that is needed during the manufacturing process. The products themselves store carbon, and wood products require less processing energy than alternatives made from plastics, metals or concrete.

Taylor co-authored the study, Carbon Impacts of Wood Products, along with Rick Bergman of the US Forest Service Forest Products Lab and Maureen Puettmann of Woodlife Environmental Consultants.

Their study was based on the results of dozens of previous research findings. Taylor called it a distillation of previous studies of lifecycle inventories, adding up all of the outputs and inputs of the manufacturing process. This would include energy used, but also emissions and other co-products, he said.

“Those life cycle inventories represent an enormous amount of work,” said Taylor. “Our study was an effort to boil down the results to a few simple values that represent the carbon impact.”

Bottom line: “If we’re interested in doing good things for the environment, then the best thing we can do is use wood products in place of other materials,” added Taylor.

The use of forest products in the United States currently supports more than one million direct jobs, particularly in rural areas, and contributes more than $100 billion to the country's gross domestic product. 

For more information contact Adam Taylor at AdamTaylor@utk.edu.

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This blog post was adapted from a press release by the USDA Forest Service, Northeastern Area State and Private Forestry.