Part of marketing domestic wood products is the positive story we can relate concerning environmental impact and sustainability.

Environmental Impact

Materials to build virtually anything must come from either the earth, sea, or forest. Wood, the earth friendly renewable resource, performs well compared to other materials. One measure of environmental impact is "embodied energy" or the total energy required to manufacture, transport, and install the material. As shown below, lumber is more efficient as a building material compared to steel, concrete, and aluminum!

Sustainability

Our hardwood resource is sustainable!!! Consider the hardwood resource in North Carolina as representative of eastern North American hardwoods in general. In the most recent forest survey conducted by the USFS in 2002, forests covered 18.3 million acres or 59 percent of North Carolina. Of that, 12.7 million acres were hardwood forests, an increase of 2 percent since the previous survey in 1990. There is over 21.6 billion cubic feet of hardwood volume, predominately consisting of yellow poplar, soft maple, sweetgum, red and white oaks, tupelo, and blackgum. From 1990 to 2001 North Carolina's average hardwood sawtimber growth exceeded removal by 54%. To state it differently, each year 2,301 million board feet of hardwood sawtimber volume was added while only 1,494 million board feet of hardwood sawtimber volume was harvested.