BSW establishes environmental performance for its construction timber

BSW Timber recently participated in the Wood for Good initiative to establish an environmental product declaration (EPD) for its kiln-dried construction timber.

The EPD from BRE Global describes the environmental impacts associated with the production of one cubic metre of sawn, kiln-dried and planed timber.

According to the EPD (BRE 000124), the global warming potential from stages A1-A3 - which covers the felling of the tree, transport to the mill, processing, kiln drying and finishing - is 107kgCO₂e/m³. When the embodied carbon is included this is calculated as minus 712 kg CO₂ eq. per m^3, making BSW timber carbon-negative.

This declaration will allow clients and end users to accurately quantify and better understand the environmental impacts of UK-grown sawn softwood, which will help to minimise the overall impact on the built environment.

Professor Callum Hill, of JCH Industrial Ecology Ltd, was asked by BSW to conduct a review of this EPD and he made the following statement:

"The EPD (BRE 000124) for sawn, planed and kiln-dried timber has been undertaken to the appropriate standards and is a comprehensive and reliable study.

"It is concluded that sawn and planed kiln-dried timber produced by BSW Timber is both a carbon-negative and an energy-negative material. The benefit of using timber in construction is that it acts as a carbon store during the period of service - storing about 6-7 times more CO₂ in the material than is released due to processing, harvesting, transportation, etc.

"Approximately 1.7 times as much energy can be recovered from the 1m³ of timber at end of life, compared with the energy required for processing, harvesting and transportation. When process residues are taken into account approximately twice as much energy is recovered from the material compared to the embodied energy."

Timber is the only material that has a carbon-negative and an energy-negative footprint, when the whole life cycle is taken into consideration.