Non wood industries muscle in on forests' image

An increasing number of non wood products are using totally unrelated images of forests or trees to evoke that warm and cuddly environmentally friendly feeling, regardless of whether the product is really green or not.

For instance, an advert for a well-known tile company is currently doing the rounds – no pictures of products, just the image of a healthy forest. Even the sun is shining.

I’m not an expert on concrete production, but I don’t need to be to know that it must be a hard sell to present it as the greenest material around. However, this industry is also rising to the challenge. It may stretch the imagination, but it’s official – you can now get “green” concrete, with a recent advert for the Surface Design Show in London highlighting an intelligent variety that can absorb carbon dioxide. And a presentation on the material at the same event finished with an image of a block with a large imprint of a single maple leaf embedded in it! Whatever next, “renewable concrete”?

I was also left dumbfounded by a recent marketing claim by a leading carpet manufacturer at the Domotex flooring show in Hannover. “We save 68,000 trees a year by using plastic cores in our carpets” it trumpeted. Incredible!

Even the steel industry is claiming that its product is the “ultimate sustainable material”, while refuting timber’s sustainability claims, with no supporting evidence.

Besides these organisations having the nerve to make such claims, what hurts is that these kind of statements so often go unchallenged.

So now is our time to act and the most effective way we can do this is to focus the debate on wood’s ability to store carbon as well as its very low embodied energy. The new advertising campaigns from wood for good and the Wood Window Alliance do just that. And we at AHEC are about to commission the most comprehensive LCA ever undertaken for hardwood, which will add yet more weight to the argument that wood is the only material that can provide a positive contribution to the carbon content of a building.

The science is on our side – all we need to do is work together to get the message across.