Replacing Carbon-Intensive Building Materials
The building sector is a major carbon emitter, in part due to the energy needed to generate steel and cement. Cement product alone accounts for ~8% of total global carbon dioxide emissions. An emerging mass-timber product called cross-laminated timber (CLT) can replace such carbon- intensive materials in buildings, but some wonder about the effects on global forest carbon dynamics if this product takes off.
“The common public perception is that we need to protect trees, not cut them down” to make innovative wood products, said Yuan Yao, Assistant Professor of Industrial Ecology and Sustainable Systems at the School of the Environment.
Also unclear is how future widespread CLT adoption might affect timber markets and industrial supply chains. Life-cycle assessment tools like carbon footprint accounting may not capture the effects of market feedback.
In collaboration with Robert Mendelsohn, the Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor of Forest Policy; Professor of Economics; and Professor, School of Management, Yao developed a model of carbon emissions and carbon sequestration across CLT’s life cycle that also estimated market responses and the resulting effects on CLT’s carbon footprint. This collaborative team also includes Alice Favero, the Senior Environmental Economist from RTI International, as well as Kai Lan and Hannah Wang who work in Yao’s research lab as a postdoctoral scholar and Ph.D. student, respectively.
The model predicted that a global increase in CLT demand would render forests and wood more valuable, incentivizing landowners to grow more trees and invest more in forest management. That, in turn, will boost forest-based carbon storage. Yao and Mendelsohn predict widespread adoption could save tens of gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalents this century.
