Sustainability message needs refining

It was great to see the young people – winners and runners-up – from the Career Development category take to the stage at the close of the TTJ Awards. The efforts they have made to push their careers forward, to gain knowledge and experience, and to apply it to the benefit of their companies, shows us that enthusiasm for wood as a material is alive and well.

The Wood Awards too, staged at this year’s inaugural Timber Expo, provide a tangible demonstration of the best our sector can offer.

Timber Expo itself is a right and proper development for a vital timber sector in its efforts to compete with other materials. Timber Expo’s programme of talks reaches out to architects and builders alike, bringing them closer to us in spirit and specification.

Yet in addition to this, we need to reach out still further, towards consumers, who need to be convinced that wood is still stylish, and can also play a role in the energy performance of their homes.

In the timber sector, we automatically see our product as “green”, sustainable, and as making a beneficial contribution to CO₂ reduction for the planet.

But are we effectively employing the last part of that message to gain sales at consumer level, to get people using more wood in their homes? I don’t think so: not yet, at least.

Perhaps it’s because we’ve been communicating timber’s CO₂ reduction role through the growth in Europe’s forests, SCA’s included. This might get us a pat on the back, but will it win us more sales? We need to refine the message so that it answers the end user’s question: “What’s in it for me?”

We need to bring the role of timber to the forefront of the Green Deal [the government’s initiative to support the implementation of energy efficient measures to households and businesses], to the centre of the debate about sustainable retrofit, and to take a leaf from the builders merchant sector in tapping into the huge potential represented by UK plc’s mandatory carbon reduction targets for 2050.

Sustainably-grown timber should naturally be part of every green retrofit project. But before that can happen, we in the industry need to feel more comfortable with carbon-related data and the concepts of whole life costing and life cycle analysis.

We’ll know we’re on the right track when we start to see this type of information being produced at the right level for Mr & Mrs Householder, not only for architects, and seeing it made available in trade and retail outlets alike.

And we’ll really be winning when local jobbing builders can see for themselves the business benefits of promoting greater use of wood to their Green Deal customers, whether structurally as glulam beams for extensions or as cladding to improve insulation.

We are the experts in our raw material. Our next challenge is to move beyond the benefits of growing trees and promote the carbon storage potential that solid wood products represent in every home. In short, we need to inspire our own future.