Creating a Greener Future

The Ultimate Renewable™ helping create a greener future for all

THE ULTIMATE RENEWABLE™

The world’s favourite material, wood The Ultimate Renewable™, combines performance, wellbeing and environmental advantages.

The Ultimate Renewable™ can play a big part in creating a greener future for all because it is a low carbon option for building; it absorbs carbon during the growth phase, it stores carbon for the long-term, it is renewable and it has a lower embodied energy than many other building materials. As a result, using wood allows us to live a low carbon lifestyle.

Wood is The Ultimate Renewable™ – helping us to live on nature’s interest, not its capital.

Wood Products Victoria believes that choosing timber is one of the biggest ways in which we can tackle climate change, creating a greener future for all.

The Right Wood Produces Less Carbon

The production and processing of wood uses much less energy – known as embodied energy – than most other building materials, giving wood products a significantly lower carbon footprint. As a result wood can be used as a low-emission substitute for materials that require larger amounts of fossil fuels to be produced. As a rule of thumb, if you convert one cubic metre of a solid material, such as concrete or brick, for a cubic metre of timber, you will eliminate approximately one tonne (1000kg) of carbon dioxide from being emitted into the atmosphere.

Timber is a natural and renewable resource, which offers both environmental and energy efficiency. It is also an appropriate construction method for the design of environmentally friendly housing in any climate.

Research has found that the global-warming potential of a steel-framed home to be 26% higher than a timber-framed home. The choice of material and design principles has a significant, but previously unrecognised, impact on energy required to construct a building.

For an average 4 bedroom house research shows that use of steel framing releases around 7 times more CO2 in production than a plantation pine frame.

Using wood in construction encourages forestry to expand, thereby increasing the carbon sink effect and reducing the rate at which CO2 builds up in the atmosphere, which in turn, helps tackle climate change.

Material	Energy used in Production (MJ/m3)	Carbon Released (kg/m3)	Carbon Stored (kg/m3)
Timber	750	15	250
Steel	266 000	5320	0
Concrete	4800	120	0
Aluminium	1 100 000	22 000	0