Wood walls and wood ceilings used in building construction offer significant environmental benefits.
There are many reasons to use wood walls and wood ceilings when building a home or any other type of building —aesthetic, acoustic, economic, technical— but today we want to discuss the environmental benefits provided by the use of wood walls and wood ceilings.
The first thing to remember is that wood is natural insulation because its has a porous inner structure creating areas which store heat, making them suitable for cladding. With thinner panels, wood walls and wood ceilings offer low levels of energy consumption. For example, to match the insulating capacity of a cylinder of a 10 cm thick cylinder of solid wood with a thermal conductivity of approx. 0.13 W/m*K, we would need up to 160 cm of another material with a thermal conductivity of approx. 2 W/m*K.
On the other hand we have to consider that wood is the most ecological raw material available. It is a natural product that does not necessarily require an industrial process in any of its stages of development and processing (planting, growing, maintaining and logging). In addition, wood needs less power to process it than any other material such as steel, aluminium, plastics, cement, etc.
Another advantage to take into account is that wood walls and wood ceilings are easily recyclable and can be turned into boards, paper pulp, sawdust, biomass or other usable by-products. Even if we did not want or could not recycle it, we should remember that the wood in wood walls and wood ceilings is biodegradable and does not pollute the soil, water or atmosphere.
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