Going Green? Harvesting Wood From Trees Means Less Carbon Emissions, Study Says

Despite the worldwide campaigns on forest conservation and log bans to promote carbon sinks and help resolve the global warming and greenhouse gas issues, a study from Switzerland chose to take a different path. Instead of keeping the trees, harvesting them was the provided option, and they also did the explanations in terms of carbon emissions.

Understanding the use of wood as oppose to keeping them as is, the life cycle analysis dby a study from the National Research Programme "Resource Wood" in the resources available in Switzerland has found out that harvesting wood will be more beneficial.

Based on the study's findings, switching to wood is estimated to cut down emissions from 2 to 3.1 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. For instance, the research tried to propose that if wood is used to replace gas or oil for heating and related combustion purposes, it will make up two-thirds of the 3.1 million estimated CO2 reduced. The rest will be coming from wood used as furniture or as raw materials for construction.

One of the reasons behind the concept of wood as an option to less carbon emission is due to the processes that other products undergo. Florian Suter, lead author, explained that environmental impacts are highly dependent on what product will be produced as well as its intended use.

"But generally speaking, the energy requirements of manufacturing wood products are relatively low as compared to other materials," he added.

The claims of Suter's group was the same with the results from a paper published on Springer. Analyzing the complete value chain, from the raw material until the end product and its whole cycle, they have also found out that wood produces less net carbon dioxide emission as compared to concrete and steel. Using building frames as their basis, Leif Gustavsson of the Mid Sweden University and his colleagues quantified that the difference between wood from steel frames ranges from 30 to 130 kilograms of carbon per square meter of floor area.