Wood as the raw material of the future
Through cascading use, this natural building material contributes to climate protection.

One in five houses in Germany is now built from wood. And the trend is rising. This is a good sign, because the ecological balance of wooden buildings is impressively good.

Over its entire life cycle, a single-family house made of wood saves up to 41 tons of CO₂ equivalents compared to a comparable house built using conventional construction methods.

At the same time, wood as an ecological raw material offers added value that should not be underestimated through what is known as cascade use, in which wood should be used as a material for as long and as often as possible. For the EU, wood products now have a cascade factor of 1.57, meaning that wood is used more than one and a half times.

An example of cascade use: sawmills are located between the forest and wood processing. In Germany alone, the production of sawn timber generates around 17 million cubic meters of by-products such as wood chips and sawdust every year. Sustainable forest thinning adds another 12 million cubic meters of roundwood that cannot be sawn. This is so much that not all of it can be processed into wood products. For this reason alone, it makes sense to use biomass as a climate-friendly energy source.

Germany has the highest pellet production in Europe. Domestic pellets consist of 90 percent sawmill by-products and only ten percent non-sawable roundwood. And after decades of growth, the wood supply in German forests is very high and is likely to increase further—because the conversion to climate-stable forests will generate a great deal of wood in the coming decades. This will continue to enable regional and sustainable use of wood as a building material for residential buildings and for the production of climate-friendly wood energy.

Source: sonderthemen.swp.de