Sustainability in the Industry
Wood Processing
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Impacts, Risks and Opportunities
Sustainability in Wood Processing
Wood is sustainable in three ways: it stores CO2, removes it from the atmosphere in the long term when installed and saves significant emissions as a replacement for more energy-intensive building materials such as steel or concrete. Substitution drives transformation.
Wood as a building material increases climate protection in construction and, as a material, promotes the bio-based circular economy. The primary goal of wood processing companies is to process wood from sustainable forestry in such a way that it can be used effectively as a carbon sink in applications for buildings, furniture or industrial applications and that wood residues are also largely used as materials. In our own production, it is important to produce in a climate-neutral manner. Many wood companies burn wood waste, use renewable energies, for example on roofs, and are mathematically climate-neutral. Sustainability efforts are also aimed at extending the life of processed wood and increasing the cascading use of the material. Because only the longest possible use, reuse and recycling is the driving force for the bio-based circular economy based on wood. And the felling of trees that have grown for decades only makes sense ecologically if the wood is used for decades.
What happens to forests if a world with 10 billion inhabitants switches to large-scale wood construction and wood applications? How is it possible to pressure the forest resource so that valuable ecosystems do not fall victim to excessive deforestation, as happens, for example, with soy in the Amazon or palm oil plantations in Indonesia? . A key may lie in hybrid systems in which wood is combined with other materials such as metals, clay or straw as crop waste for applications. Protecting forests from fire and excessive deforestation remains a key task for the industry. Transparency regarding origin and product-specific emissions, including upstream and downstream stages, is therefore very relevant. Ecologically harmful raw materials such as tropical wood from rainforest areas should be avoided. As a supplier to downstream industries such as the construction, furniture, paper and printing industries, the timber industry has a responsibility.
The industry includes, for example, sawmills and lumber mills, the production of wooden panels and structural parts as well as storage containers made of wood. Wood producing companies such as forestry companies, forest owners and forestry companies and timber trading companies are assigned to industry 2 “Forestry”.
Industry Materiality
Key Fields in the Industry
Resources
Nature
Climate
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EU NACE Classification
Industry NACE Classes
Included NACE classes in the industry
16.10 – Sawmills, planing mills and wood impregnation mills
16.21 – Production of veneer, plywood, wood fiber and chipboard
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