With the recent revision of The Code for Sustainable Homes setting new standards, there is a growing appetite among architects and developers for more information on sustainable products and services. How to incorporate these sustainable materials into new build design is now the next challenge. Sustainability is the capacity to endure. It is about one of the most lasting physical parts of our lives: the building’s in which we live, work and play every day. So what would be the ideal sustainable construction material? 

The Future is Wood

The versatility and enduring aesthetic appeal of wood has never been stronger than today.  Both builders and designers always return to wood products, including new modified wood products that offer even more possibilities for wood construction.

A good example of a sustainable wood product is Accoya^® wood, produced by Accsys Technologies. This is a non-toxic, modified high technology wood, made from sustainably sourced, fast growing wood species, which is highly durable and dimensionally stable and ideal for use in demanding external applications. By significantly enhancing the performance of fast-growing and abundantly available certified wood, such that it is at least commensurate with that of the very best tropical hardwoods, Accoya^® wood provides compelling environmental advantages over slow-growing hardwoods, woods treated with toxic chemicals, and non-renewable carbon-intensive materials such as plastics, steel and concrete. 

Wood brings the best of everything – proven construction benefits, along with sound environmental advantages – from the forest floor to the construction site through to recycling or use as fuel.  This makes wood a natural choice for today’s designers and builders as well as satisfying the four basic principles of green building:

• Reducing energy use during the building service life
• Minimizing external pollution and environmental damage
• Reducing resource depletion 
• Minimising internal pollution and damage to health

Wood is an immensely capable mainstream construction material now available in an ever-increasing array of engineered structural and non-structural forms - and of course nature creates it with such an astonishing variety of natural beauty and performance characteristics together with the invaluable advantageous benefit of carbon storage.  

Sustainably managed forests and wood products offer great potential to ease our transition away from a fossil-fuel based economy, partly due to their carbon sequestration properties. Healthy growing forests not only naturally recycle carbon, they provide products that meet society's demand for timber, fibre and energy. 

• Using wood instead of other building materials saves on average 0.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide per cubic metre (source: Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management)
• Build cost of energy-efficient homes and buildings are lower with wood (Source: Salford Centre for Research and innovation)
• Wood is a natural insulator and, as such, reduces energy used for heating 
• Wood offers good sound absorption properties

Timber construction has a higher heat insulation value than conventional construction methods, even with lower wall thicknesses. An external wall constructed using timber may have only half the thickness of a brick or concrete wall, yet provides double the thermal insulation value, while at the same time avoiding the thermal bridging common with other construction methods.  Wood is 400-times less heat conductive than steel and 8.5 times less conductive than concrete, so homes built with wood framing take less energy to heat and cool.

However, only wood products from sustainably managed sources can truly be described as one of the planet’s most valuable resources. Using sustainably grown wood and improving its properties without adding toxins helps protect threatened species, rainforests and the environment and is now the way forward for designers and builders to utilise this wonderful natural material right across the construction project.