Forest Products:
Turning over a new leaf.
Wood is more than just a useful material—it’s a renewable resource that can be sustainably harvested.
Society needs stuff:
lumber for houses1, mass timber for buildings, cardboard for shipping, and paper for you to write us a thank you note for this awesome data visualization.
Plus who can forget the Great Toilet Paper Freakout of 20202?
Now let this sink in.
Forest products extend the carbon benefits from the forests to your desk, house, and #2 Ticonderoga.
The more of this natural, biodegradable, carbon-storing material3 we use, the less other stuff* 4 we use.
= 10 MMT of CO2e
And one of the biggest opportunities for wood?
Helping to mitigate the climate impact of the built environment5.
Embracing a new construct.
Globally, the built environment is responsible for ~40% of greenhouse gas emissions6 (GHG).
Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions
It’s estimated that construction and the built environment will emit an additional 100,000 MMT of CO2e by 2050 unless we start making changes to less carbon-intensive construction methods and building materials7 (by utilizing mass timber8, for instance).
Making a massive difference.
Substituting wood for concrete and steel in commercial buildings can cut GHG emissions by an average of 60%.
Cities built from bio-based materials such as timber act as constructed carbon sinks—they can actually increase the existing carbon storage pool of urban areas by 25% to 170%.
But can our forests meet the demand?
Absolutely.
Harvests occur on less than 2% of working forest land each year.9
And the vast majority of wood products come from private working forests.
Private working forests are sustainable10.
As a global leader in sustainable forest management, the U.S. has been able to consistently deliver carbon-storing wood products11 and increase overall timberland volume, outpacing America’s rising population.
How is that possible?
In the U.S., we don’t cut and move on.
We replant, regrow, and regenerate12 the same amount we cut each year, maintaining a natural balance.
Today, private forest owners are planting more trees than they harvest.
A continuous cycle.
Private working forests really do work.
Let’s recap: private working forests provide:
Total Annual Gross
Sequestration
Carbon Storage
Forest Products
- The Average American House
The average American house has some serious climate-mitigation potential. Fun fact: around 90% of single-family homes in the U.S. are framed out of wood. And since half of wood’s weight is carbon, the typical home is storing about 11,000 kg or about 50 kg/m2 of carbon. That’s a lot of carbon!
Now, we all know Americans really don’t like using the metric system, so we’ve got you covered…. That carbon in an average house weighs as much as one to three killer whales.
return - The Great Toilet Paper Freakout of 2020
Why did all the toilet paper disappear? One study attempts to answer that question.
return - How much of wood is carbon?
Wood is about 50% carbon by dry weight.
return - The “other stuff” adds up
Concrete alone is expected to contribute 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2060.
Source: 2020 Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction from the UN Environment Programme. (Page 48, Section 5.2.1, second paragraph)
If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, after the U.S. and China.
return - The built environment
Contrary to popular belief, U.S. cities are not built on rock and roll.* In fact, they are usually made of concrete. 70% of the world’s population now lives in structures made at least partly out of concrete.
How we build the buildings where we live, work, and play will need to change if we are serious about meeting climate goals.
One study analyzed a scenario in which the structural system of one building – a one-story medical center – was completely redesigned using wood products. That approach achieved the most significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over conventional construction materials using other materials – about a 166% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
*If you’re reading this on a desktop, feel free to let this song – which is an absolute banger – play on another tab while you read through the rest of this page. If you’re reading this on your phone, you should add Starship to your queue for later.
return - The built environment is a huge source of emissions
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, buildings and their construction account for 37% of carbon dioxide emissions globally.
return - Substitution makes a BIG difference
Start by thinking small. Not ants, that’s too small… Like, the stuff under your feet small: Carbon emissions can be lowered by as much as 20x by simply installing wood flooring instead of vinyl.
Now, think BIG. As in, the cities of the future and what that means for global emissions: Substituting conventional building materials with wood in half of new urban construction could provide 9% of global emissions reduction needed to meet 2030 targets for keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Almost a tenth of necessary emissions reductions could come from choosing a different material for expected urban contraction that would occur one way or another.
We have all been trained by pop culture to imagine a future in space, where the places we live are made of metal and plastic, and probably some other sci-fi stuff that doesn’t exist yet. Ask anyone to imagine a futuristic home and they’re going to draw something out of Star Wars, Star Trek, or the Jetsons. Despite how cool the Starship Enterprise looks, if we want to live on this planet, our futuristic human habitats will need to be made from natural, renewable, sustainable, and green materials – like wood.
Speaking of Star Wars and the built environment… this actual, official response from the White House to a 2012 public petition is the most gloriously nerdy thing you will read this week:
“Those who sign here petition the United States government to secure funding and resources, and begin construction on a Death Star by 2016. By focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense.”
Yes, this was real… it was a simpler time. For the record, the people behind ForestCarbonDataviz.org would support the construction of a Death Star if it weren’t for the associated emissions.
return - Is using mass timber, like, sustainable?
Excitement about the possibilities of mass timber inevitably lead to questions about the sustainability of the U.S. timber supply. Like the olestra craze of the 1990s, everyone wants to know what the, um, undesirable side effects could be. While it’s generally agreed upon that the carbon benefits of substituting wood for concrete and steel is a good thing, no one wants to create a situation that leads to deforestation. Thankfully, this is a question that has been asked and answered in this article by Jeff Commick, Luke Rogers, and Kent Wheiler in Sustainability. In short, the outlook is good:
Read: “Increasing Mass Timber Consumption in the U.S. and Sustainable Timber Supply“
return - Where did we get the 2% figure?
This figure is calculated through an analysis of the RPA and FIA data. The analysis was done by the National Council of Air and Stream Improvement, Inc. (NCASI). You can read about it in full here.
Harvests of any type – thinning, road construction, fire fuel breaks, or final harvests – occur on less than 2% of working forests.
Acres where harvests occurred in 2018 totaled 7,878,000 acres (7,180,000 on private land, and 698,000 on public land).
The whole notion of how much we regrow is based on the fact that if it’s not regrown, then it’s no longer forest. If it’s no longer a forest, it’s no longer forestry we’re talking about, but land use conversion. The RPA tells us that overall, we’re not losing forest cover in the U.S. The numbers changed less than 1/10th of 1%, which is within our sampling error… So for every acre that might have been harvested and not regrown (i.e. turned into a neighborhood or big box store), there was another acre somewhere that someone let grow back into trees.
return - Forest Cover has been Stable Since the 1900s
U.S. forest cover has been stable since the 1900s. There’s a big misconception that the deforestation of tropical forests in places like Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brazil are the same challenges U.S. forests are facing. In the U.S., forest products are not causing deforestation. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. In the U.S. we regrow what is harvested. As a mature sector, modern forestry in the U.S. has some of the highest sustainability standards in the world. Private forest owners have an economic interest to keep working forests healthy, growing, and productive… So they do!
U.S. forest growth exceeds harvest levels – even in the most conservative scenario, using the lowest estimate of growth and the highest estimate of harvest volumes required to meet incremental demand for both lumber and mass timber in 2035.
We’re mostly sticking to carbon and climate change on this page, but if you are interested in forest sustainability, be sure to check out Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), American Tree Farm System (ATFS), and the U.S. Forest Service National Report on Sustainable Forests
return - Wood Product Sink vs. National Parks
Wood products store more than double the carbon stored in all national parks.
National Parks store 3,465 MMT of CO2e (See Table 4, showing National Parks C stocks as 945 MMT C, which is 3,465 MMT CO2e)
Wood products store 10,010.0 MMT of CO2e. The carbon storage pool data is from table 6-12 in the Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks.
return - Regrown? Replanted? Regenerated? What does it all mean?
“Regrown” is not a scientific term, but it is how average people speak, and it is the best way to describe the replacing of trees or a forest by any method. Foresters make the decision to use natural regeneration or replanting based on a host of variables. Across the country, varying ecosystems, climates, geographies, and species compositions make forests incredibly diverse, which impacts how foresters – the experts – determine the best way to regrow.
Natural regeneration is basically letting nature take its course. It most often occurs by way of natural seeding (think: acorns or wind-blown seeds), stump sprouts or root sprouts from existing trees. Natural regeneration is typically the most effective approach in hardwood forests.
In forest management terms, replanting means human involvement, sticking seedlings into the ground either by hand or with machines. Machine and hand planting of seedlings is more commonly used to regenerate conifer stands.
Most people want to ask, “how many trees do we plant a year?” Well, determining the exact number of trees “replanted” each year is actually much harder than one might think. We know for sure that we plant more than 1 billion trees a year in the United States, but we think that’s pretty conservative. What’s more, natural regeneration makes it impossible to calculate a total number of trees regrown each year.
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