Dovetail partners announces release of new publication highlighting wood building products and carbon storage

Ability of wood to store carbon provides significant environmental advantage over, other building materials

(Minneapolis, MN) – Dovetail Partners, a Minneapolis-based environmental think tank, is pleased to announce the release of a new publication titled, Building with Wood: Proactive Climate Change. 

The publication highlights wood building products and their natural ability to store carbon. The ability of wood to store large quantities of carbon for long periods of time sets wood apart from, and provides a significant environmental advantage over, other building materials such as steel and concrete. Building with wood also results in reduced energy requirements and CO2 emissions compared to other building materials. The publication highlights the diverse benefits that forests and wood provide, wood’s ability to proactively protect the climate, the wood life cycle, and opportunities for utilizing wood in commercial scale buildings.

Three commercial wood building projects are highlighted as examples, including an urban infill apartment complex in Marina del Ray, CA, a student housing complex at the University of Washington, Seattle, and a theater complex in Washington, DC. The carbon impacts of each project have been quantified for comparison to similar activities.

“Building with wood is an active form of climate protection,” states Jeff Howe, PhD, Dovetail’s President and project director. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pointed out, “A sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber fiber or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained (climate change) mitigation benefit.”

The publication is based on the work of Holzforschung Munchen and Technische University Munchen, Germany and has been updated with information specific to the U.S. Project partners included Dovetail Partners and State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry with additional design work by George Jerzy Hornik. This edition was funded by Binational Softwood Lumber Council.

Source

Dovetail Partners Inc., press release, 2015-01-21.

Supplier

Dovetail Partners Inc.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
New York University
Softwood Lumber Council
Technische Universität München (TUM)
University of Washington

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