Interesting Facts about wood & construction in US

Why do we built with wood?

The facts:

• US got a lot of wood
• 5% of earth’s forest is in US, 10% in Canada
• is fast to work
• US has a lot of experience using it
• Over 90% of US homes are built with wood
• Since 1940 the number of houses in US has more than triplet, from 37.5 million to 128 million
• The number of single-family detached houses over the last 70 years has gone from 23 million to 77 million
• Over the last 40 years the size of a home has gone from 1,500 SF to 2,500 SF
• A contemporary 2,000 SF wood framed single family house uses about 16,000 board feet of framing and about 11,000 SF of other wood materials.
• The land area of US is nearly 2.3 billion acres. Before, in 1620 over a billion of those 2.3 billion acres were forest. Today is around 750 million acres of forest.
• Most of the loss happened between 1850 and 1910.
• Despite the continually increasing use of wood, the US forest’ tree density has increased in the past 50 years. Net forest growth is 3%, while harvesting is 2%
• 40% of US forest are owned by the government, but over 11 million private owners have the rest 60%. In contrast CANADA government owns 94% of forest.
• In addition to making oxygen, trees stores carbon. US forest remove over 1.5 trillion pounds of CO2 from the atmosphere annually, offsetting more than 10% of US emissions.

Interesting facts about wood and its relation to construction! and how good would it be that the US could require all private and federal/state owners of those forest to harvest in accordance with the guidelines provided by the Forest Stewardship Council FSC .

“Founded in 1993 as a response to concerns about global deforestation, the Forest Stewardship Council is a global, independent, non-profit corporation dedicated to the preservation and maintenance of the world’s forests, nationally represented in more than 50 countries worldwide. To this end, it administers a certification program to wood producers around the world, awarding its certification to producers of varying sizes, with different kinds of ownership, that manage diverse types of forests. To qualify, a forestry operation must meet the FSC Principles and Criteria, which describe how a forest must be managed to meet diverse ecological, cultural, socioeconomic, and spiritual needs of current and future generations, including managerial, social, and environmental requirements.” credit from http://www.greenedu.com/blog/2009/8/20/a-look-at-forest-stewardship-council-wood.html