Collective action can achieve significant change, especially when an idea gains momentum. Reduction of wood waste has gained some momentum, but there’s still a long way to go. No-one wants waste, especially not at today’s landfill prices. Collectively as an industry, we have the power to reduce waste throughout the supply chain, and to reduce associated costs and environmental impacts. Yet currently we’re in danger of making wood – our completely renewable, carbon-reducing raw material – much less sustainable through our actions.
Working with WRAP, the construction industry has been rightly targeting the halving, by the end of this year, of construction and demolition waste going to landfill. But where does a lot of this waste come from? The pervasive culture of “we’ve always done it that way” is largely to blame. In a builders merchants with a low stock-turn, a long length of joinery timber can eventually become bowed and be rejected as ‘waste’. There are fewer needs for long single lengths of joinery grades these days. They’re not efficient to produce, package or transport so why do they persist? Is it because “we’ve always done it that way”?
True sustainability in business demands a three-part approach: simultaneously addressing economic, environmental and societal impacts. One of the quickest industry-wide sustainability gains could be to reduce the 350-400 different patterns of timber mouldings sold today by at least half. Regional variations and ‘specials’ for historic buildings account for part of that diversity, but with today’s minimalist home décor, we’re all noticing a significant societal shift to fewer and simpler moulding patterns. Is now the time to start letting go of what we’ve always done, and to work towards a more resource-efficient, more sustainable product offering?
Benefits of standardisation
SCA is a volume manufacturer, so you’re probably thinking: “They would say that, wouldn’t they?” But look at it from the sustainability viewpoint. Yes, there are obvious gains from economies of scale in producing greater numbers of more standardised products. There are also multiple environmental benefits. To start with, fewer product types reduces the need for wrapping materials and printed labels. Producing less wrapping and printing fewer labels naturally uses fewer resources, and generates less CO2 from their manufacture and transport. It can also mean less packaging waste to be dealt with at the other end of the supply chain.
At SCA’s Carbon Footprint conference in 2009 we shared our research showing that, of the total combined CO2 emissions generated by growing a tree in Sweden, harvesting it, processing the wood and shipping and delivering it into a UK destination, around 10% resulted from product shrink-wrapping alone. And yet at SCA our systems are reasonably carbon-efficient.
It’s all too easy to add another 5-10% to the CO2 total using the multiple-drop delivery pattern frequently requested by retailing and merchanting customers. These calculations don’t include the environmental consequences of business philosophies like just in time, which requires frequent and ever-smaller product deliveries, and the CO2 impacts of servicing online shopping.
Automotive industry
Surely it’s within our collective intelligence as an industry to reduce emissions, resource use – and costs – by looking now at the number and type of products sold, and how we deliver them. The automotive industry has faced much greater challenges on inventory and manufacturing without keeling over.
The sellers of our industry’s output want to see a return on capital employed for their retail or warehousing floor-space, or on their housing estate lands. As growers and manufacturers of wood products, we in the industry need to gain a return on capital employed in production and delivery. The two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive, providing we’re looking through the whole life costing lens which end-of-line customers use for product selection.
A further focus point for industries worldwide this year is the 20th anniversary of the UN’s Rio conference on the global environment. As a forest owner, SCA Timber Supply strives for the most resource-efficient use of all valuable raw materials. We want to encourage the optimisation of wood stocks and other resources by merchants and manufacturers, mirroring the attitude we adopt from the moment a log enters our sawmills.
Better return for merchants
Carrying a smaller but more business-efficient range of products generates better stock-turn at merchants, and less wood will go to waste as a result. Special variations in moulding patterns can still be produced, but let them be a local added-value service available from the merchant.
With the potential for carbon taxes and a dwindling global resource base, there are bound to be challenges ahead for business. The Timber Trade Federation amongst others recognises that full life cycle analysis of wood products is on the horizon. To make wood the number one choice in building and living applications we need to approach its sustainability collectively along supply chains, recognising all the factors that may in future influence its selection by the end customer.