Solid Wood Walls - for Warm Dry Healthy Buildings with Negative CO2 Emissions

Thanks to German Innovation and Fast Growing Softwood Plantations.

Trees have been stabilizing the world’s climate for millions of years. Global warming, and the threat of climate change, mean that we need trees more than ever. But even more important is to maximise the benefit of trees.

Buildings are the world's greatest source of CO2 emissions. Even in the USA, buildings emit more CO2 than motor vehicles. Much of the CO2 emissions come from the energy required to heat, cool and ventilate buildings, but there is also significant energy needed to create the materials to build, and maintain buildings.

This is called embodied energy. There has been considerable amount of study done in New Zealand and Australia, on comparing the CO2 emissions from different building systems. Andrew Alcorn at the Centre for Building Research at Victoria University in New Zealand, has produced a set for CO2 emission figures for common building materials. These figures show that softwood can have negative emissions of up to 1,665 g CO2 per kg of wood. This is because wood can store far more CO2 than is emitted from the processing of the wood. CO2 storage in buildings becomes very significant when using German style solid wood buildings designed to last for at least 300 years.

Light timber frame buildings usually have wood combined with large amounts of other materials with high emissions, so that the whole building can have quite high emissions. The answer is to use more wood and less of the high emission materials. When solid wood walls are used, a building can have negative emissions. And if enough wood is used, the building can have negative emissions for many years including energy from heating, cooling and ventilating.

A well designed solid wood building, is not just good for the environment, it also can be very healthy, warm and dry for the occupants. The more wood that is used, the healthier it is for the building occupants and the environment. Explore this web site to find exciting opportunities to use solid wood walls and Organicbuilding principles. See how you can benefit by looking at the whole picture of planting trees to store carbon, and harvesting and using them for healthy, warm, energy efficient, negative emission buildings. No matter whether you just want to live in a healthy, negative emission building, or you are part of the forestry, sawmilling, wood manufacturing, building or design industries, you can help solve the world’s greatest challenge of Climate Change. .

Solid Wood Walls and Organicbuilding

See how you could benefit from Organicbuilding, defined as Warm, Dry, Healthy buildings with negative CO2 emissions, using solid wood walls made from fast growing, renewable plantation softwood.

Building with solid wood walls makes great sense. Click on 6 good reasons to see why.

Solid wood wall buildings can be of almost any style. Click on Solid Wood Buildings to see more examples from Germany.