Wood is the ultimate green building material. It can be produced on an endlessly renewable cycle that both protects the environment and sustains rural communities. Its production consumes less energy, emits fewer greenhouse gases, releases fewer pollutants, stores more carbon and generates less water pollution compared with other building materials such as steel and concrete. It’s also safe, durable and beautiful.   

WOOD IS A NATURAL, RENEWABLE RESOURCE 

After we harvest trees in our sustainably managed working forests and make them into a multitude of different wood products, we replant the forest and start the cycle over again.  

We plant about 130-150 million trees each year
We harvest an average of only 2 percent of our land base each year, which means 98 percent of our forests are always growing and providing numerous benefits to society and the planet, including wildlife habitat, recreation opportunities and a variety of important ecosystem services. On average, we plant about 130 to 150 million tree seedlings each year on our harvested sites — that’s more than 360,000 per day, more than 15,000 per hour and about four per second.  

WOOD PRODUCTS STORE CARBON 

As trees grow, they absorb carbon dioxide from the air and store it in their trunks, limbs, roots and leaves. When we harvest trees at their peak of growth and turn them into wood products such as lumber, we lock that carbon into the product and then replant new trees to store more carbon. It's an ever-increasing equation that continues to pull more and more carbon out of the atmosphere over time.

Wood Products Store CO2
The solid and engineered wood products we made in 2021 alone will keep more than the equivalent of 11 million metric tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere for at least 100 years. That is equal to the amount of  emissions from the electricity used in 2 million homes in one year (based on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator).    
Learn more about the powerful contribution we make as a natural climate solution by sequestering and storing carbon in our forests and wood products in our Carbon Record.

WOOD PRODUCTS ARE LOWER IN EMBODIED ENERGY 

Wood Products Energy Graphic
Independent life-cycle assessments substantiate the low energy intensity of wood products compared with the energy-intensive processes required to mine and manufacture other building materials. In fact, researchers have found that buildings made primarily out of wood have significantly lower embodied energy — a measure of all the energy required to make a product — compared to steel and concrete. Seperate studies published in the Journal of Sustainable Forestry and the Journal of Forestry, as well as findings from the  Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials, have determined that houses constructed with wood have anywhere between 17 to 58 percent lower embodied energy than those framed with steel, and anywhere between 16 to 55 percent lower embodied energy than those made primarily with concrete.