Introduction to Special Issue Extending the Findings on the Environmental Performance of Wood Building Materials

This compendium provides extensions to the research first reported in the December 2005 Wood and Fiber Science Special Issue (WFS 2005) devoted to CORRIM’s Reports on Environmental Performance of Wood Building Materials. The Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials (CORRIM) is a nonprofit research consortium made up of 15 research institutions dedicated to developing comprehensive environmental performance information on all stages of processing for wood building materials consistent with life-cycle methods and standards (www.corrim.org). That report summarized a 4-yr undertaking to collect all the inputs and outputs for each stage of processing wood products through to the final use of building materials, including forest regeneration, product manufacturing, construction, building use and maintenance, and final disposal or recycling. Life-cycle inventory (LCI) tables were produced for forest regeneration and harvesting in the two major US supply regions—Pacific Northwest (PNW) and Southeast—carried through to the production of softwood lumber, plywood, OSB, glulam beams, LVL, I-joists, and trusses with the processing LCIs based on primary data surveys of a sample from many mills in each region. Life-cycle assessments (LCA) for environmental impacts—energy, global warming potential, air and water pollution, solid waste— were developed for a virtual house built to code in Atlanta, a warm climate, and Minneapolis, a cold climate. A LCA index for ecosystem impacts was developed for sustainable management alternatives for the PNW forests given the substantial efforts in that region to protect species at risk. The primary product database was uploaded to the US LCI database managed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) where one can access the LCI data for nonwood material as well as CORRIM data on wood materials (NREL 2008). A cradle-to-product gate LCI for each product was included in the Wood and Fiber Science Special Issue (pages 18 – 29).