Abstract
Climate change, environmental degradation, and limited resources are motivations for sustainable forest management. Forests, the most abundant renewable resource on earth, used to make a wide variety of forest-based products for human consumption. To provide a scientific measure of a product’s sustainability and environmental performance, the life cycle assessment (LCA) method is used. This article provides a comprehensive review of environmental performances of forest-based products including traditional building products, emerging (mass-timber) building products and nanomaterials using attributional LCA. Across the supply chain, the product manufacturing life-cycle stage tends to have the largest environmental impacts. However, forest management activities and logistics tend to have the greatest economic impact. In addition, environmental trade-offs exist when regulating emissions as indicated by the latest traditional wood building product LCAs. Interpretation of these LCA results can guide new product development using biomaterials, future (mass) building systems and policy-making on mitigating climate change. Key challenges include handling of uncertainties in the supply chain and complex interactions of environment, material conversion, resource use for product production and quantifying the emissions released.
Highlights
IntroductionThe use of raw materials (for the production of food, energy, and construction) has increased exponentially, especially since the nineteenth century [1,2]
The use of raw materials has increased exponentially, especially since the nineteenth century [1,2]
Studies began to link life cycle stages along with the LCIA. All these earlier studies used mass allocation as their primary allocation with a few including an economic allocation to illustrate the potential difference and the need to set up a consistent protocol, which led to product category rules (PCRs) for creating wood building product environmental product declarations (EPDs) along with the credits obtained in green building certification schemes [56]
Summary
The use of raw materials (for the production of food, energy, and construction) has increased exponentially, especially since the nineteenth century [1,2]. Resources from forests provide renewable construction materials (especially for buildings), pulp and paper, energy, bioproducts and more. Despite abundant availability of forest resources, it may be hard to fulfill the global demand for forest resources to produce needed construction materials, pulp and paper, energy and fuel without continuing practicing sustainable forest management [8,9]. Society sees forests as a source of renewable and sustainable natural resources for building materials, fibers, biofuel, and other renewable materials to mitigate climate change while fulfilling society’s increasing demands for economic well-being [10,11]. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a scientific approach to analyze and quantify the environmental burdens associated with resource extraction, manufacturing, use and disposal of a product [12,13,14]
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