About Sustainable Wood
Sustainable Wood is an international consultancy, news and information service. Simply put our focus is what makes wood sustainable.
Wood is increasingly seen as a vital construction and manufacturing material for the future. Latest production advances are further improving its technical performance – engineered wood products are now as strong and predictable as energy intensive alternatives like steel and concrete, while high-rise, multi-storey wood-based buildings have become mainstream. Timber businesses and researchers are also significantly broadening wood’s applications and possibilities through development of new cellulose-based products, from fibres, fabrics and advanced wood composites, to aviation biofuel.
Most critical of all, wood absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere while growing and stores it throughout its life. So our cultivation and use of it can be a significant part of the solution to the climate crisis. But to ensure this and reap the maximum benefit from wood in all applications, the wood we use and the way we use it must be sustainable. Clearly that starts in the forests there the wood originates. These must be sustainably managed to ensure wood production is not implicated in deforestation or other environmental degradation and that forests of all types maximise their potential as the home for a great part of the worlds terrestrial and aquatic species.
But true wood sustainability is about much more. It’s about the way we transport, process and treat it, how we machine it to get maximum yield from the resource, how we apply it to get maximum performance from the minimum of material. Sustainability is also about how we recover wood when its time is up in one application and reuse and recycle it in another. It’s about maximising the time carbon is locked into the material and ultimately it’s about how we dispose of wood when it reaches the end of its useful life and completes the carbon cycle.
In our consultancy capacity, Sustainable Wood builds on cutting-edge research and analysis to help develop frameworks for independent verification, policy analysis and market-monitoring of legal and sustainable forest products. We provide these services to the range of stakeholders, including international and national government agencies, trade and industry associations and companies, and civil society organisations.
In our news and information provision, we provide independent commentary and reports on developments in forest and wood product legality verification and sustainability certification. We cover advances in sustainable forest management and cultivation and sustainability focused innovation in timber processing and wood application, from building to manufacturing. We look at latest wood end of life approaches and their impacts.
Through our previous and ongoing projects, we have extensive experience in organising and facilitating stakeholder consultations, workshops and press conferences. See our Event Management section for further information.