Wood Cuts - August/September 2010

By Ed Korczak

In today’s market, it’s rare to find a flooring product that is not making some sort of a green declaration. Unfortunately, too many of these claims are greenwashing—the act of falsely claiming that a product is environmentally friendly when it is not or indicating that a product is more green than it is. As an increasing number of consumers demand the use of green products in their homes and businesses, incidents of greenwashing are sure to rise.

Being green is much more than simply being a rapidly renewable material. To truly analyze the green nature of a product, one must look at its entire production process and lifecycle, from cradle to grave. It is not only a matter of whether raw materials can be replaced quickly, but also how those materials are procured, how they are used when making a finished product, and what happens to them once their useful life comes to an end.

Wood flooring is one of the precious few completely renewable flooring options. Its raw material is soil and water, and its factory, powered by free energy from the sun, is the forest. No other flooring option uses fewer natural resources to produce its material, and, best of all, when the materials used to make wood floors are harvested, they can be replanted to replenish the resource for generations to come.

In past years, many environmental groups have criticized wood producers for clear-cutting their forests to harvest raw materials. That is not the case for the vast majority of today’s hardwoods, which are used to manufacture wood flooring. Hardwood forests are selectively harvested to maximize product yield, while sustaining the future supply of the raw materials. In fact, it is critically necessary to harvest hardwood forests in this fashion for several reasons.

First, it is necessary to remove the top canopy from time to time so that smaller trees can emerge from the forest floor and grow to their full maturity. Second, a tree has a finite lifespan, and, when it reaches maturity, it begins to die. It is important to harvest the tree before this process occurs and it becomes useless as a raw material. Third, during their growth period, hardwood trees take in carbon dioxide through a process that releases oxygen. When a hardwood tree reaches the end of its growth cycle, this process reverses, and the tree stops sequestering carbon dioxide and instead begins to release it. Therefore, a harvested tree will hold onto carbon far longer than a tree left to decompose in the forest.

The impact of rapidly renewable materials as a green attribute is a difficult component to measure as well. As a flooring material, hardwood can easily last in excess of 100 years when properly maintained. Unlike other flooring materials that need to be replaced when they begin to show wear and tear, wood floors can be renewed time and time again. In most cases, a simple pad and recoat of the floor is all that is needed to restore the wood to its original luster. If the wear is more significant, the floor can be sanded numerous times throughout its life to remove scratches, dents, stains and other blemishes. There is usually no need to replace wood floors with new flooring material. In almost all cases, it is possible to renew or repair the existing material to extend its product life. It takes 40 to 60 years for a hardwood tree to fully mature. Since hardwood floors have a 100 year plus lifespan, hardwood, on average, renews at twice the rate that current floors need to be replaced.

When hardwood flooring does reach the end of its service life, it can be completely reclaimed and the flooring can be salvaged to use for other purposes. The floor can be chipped and used for mulch or other end-products, or it can be used as a combustible source of energy. In fact, much of the waste material created in the production of wood flooring is used to provide heat and other energy to the plants that manufacture the end product. There is also a growing side market that has emerged in the past few years that makes use of production waste material. Saw dust and other small bits of wood are pressed into pellets that are used as a heating source in homes and businesses.

The production of wood floors is one of the most environmentally friendly flooring manufacturing processes as well. A lifecycle analysis of hardwood flooring by the University of Wisconsin-Madison showed that solid wood floors use less water and energy to produce than any other flooring option studied, including carpet, ceramic tile and linoleum. Wood floors also had no harmful air emissions, like methane and nitrogen oxides, that contribute to atmospheric warming or human respiratory ailments.

A similar study of engineered wood floors revealed an even more compelling conservation story with regard to raw materials. Engineered wood floors are manufactured using a series of wood plies. Each ply is assembled on a perpendicular axis to the ply above or below it to increase the dimensional stability of the wood. Even though engineered wood is not a solid wood product by definition, it is still a product composed of 100% wood. The top ply is composed of high-quality wood, while the middle and lower layers can be manufactured using wood of a lesser quality, often of a different species, therefore increasing the yield of the raw materials. In this way, there is less waste material from manufacturing the finished product, resulting in more yield of the raw materials from each tree harvested.

One of the major pushes to help promote the responsible management of hardwood forests within the United States is the National Wood Flooring Association’s Responsible Procurement Program (RPP) Forest Stewardship Council Procurement Group. This group was formed with the purpose of exploring, reviewing and developing systems for private landowners to adopt FSC certification.

FSC certification offers the highest assurance of environmental and social performance in the forest products industry. Demand for FSC certified wood has increased dramatically during the past few years, based on an increase in consumer desire for environmentally responsible building products. However, in the United States, FSC certified forests represent only a small percentage of the standing forest volume. Approximately 270 million acres of working forest in the United States are owned by small forest owners, but only 2.5 million of those acres are certified to FSC standards.

The FSC Procurement Group is working to remove the barriers to become FSC certified and increase the amount of FSC certified wood available in the United States. The program has received significant approval from environmental groups, several of which have joined the organization, including the Rainforest Alliance, Domtar, FSC Family Forest Alliance, Scientific Certification Systems and the Nature Conservancy.

The FSC Procurement Group was formed as part of the NWFA’s Responsible Procurement Program, which recognizes wood flooring companies that work to sustain our world’s forests. The NWFA RPP is supported by the Forest Stewardship Council U.S. and the FSC Family Forests Alliance, and recognized as a valid incremental approach toward socially and environmentally responsible forestry.

While some flooring products require that consumers sift through a pile of green claims to determine which are authentic and which are greenwashing, hardwood has a simple and honest green story that extends from cradle to grave, forest to end-of-life.