The wood industry gets a bad environmental rap, according to three speakers related to the Canadian timber industry who spoke Tuesday night at Lawrence Technological University.
It turns out wood is the greener choice, speakers said at "Wood: the More Sustainable Structural System," a presentation of Lawrence Tech, the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers, the Detroit Regional Chapter of the United States Green Building Council and WWJ Newsradio 950.
"How many building materials are solar powered CO2 sucking machines with a beautiful appearance?" asked Peter Moonen, sustainability and special projects coordinator for British Columbia Wood Works, an initiative of the Canadian Wood Council. "Wood is a carbon sink, renewable, recyclable, reusable and organic."
And yet the typical image of the timber industry, he said, is "a guy with a chain saw going into the woods to kill trees."
Moonen said today's green building calculus also doesn't take into account wood's excellent acoustic properties, its insulation properties, its low thermal mass and its efficiency at performing several functions at once.
A typical 2,400-square-foot wood frame home sequesters 30 tons of carbon, about the same amount generated by driving a car for five to seven years (depending on the size of the car).
Moonen showed gorgeous wood buildings that have been built for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, and a really cool six-story modular wood apartment building.
Marianne Berube, executive director of Ontario Wood Works, said the timber industry has done a poor job of promoting itself and its environmental bona fides in the face of increasing competition from the steel and concrete industries.
She offered pictures of striking examples of wood in architecture, including an interior shot of Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, and offered case studies of wood commercial buildings -- a hospital in North Bay, Ontario, where she lives, a 180,000-square-foot long teerm care home in North Bay, a community center near Ottawa, and the Four Seasons Performing Arts Center and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.
She said Canada is doing a good job of maintaining its forested space, currently at 91 percent of pre-European settlement levels. She said Canada isn't even close to harvesting its lumber at a pace greater than regrowth.
David Moses, a Ph.D. senior engineer with Equilibrium Consulting in Toronto, gave a close look at a five-story wood addition to the Art Gallery of Ontario, a complex geometry spanning more than 500 feet along Dundas Street in which no two pieces are alike and slender timbers hold a huge structure aloft. Only technologies that have emerged in the past 10 years, including three-dimensional design software, make such structures possible, Moses said.
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