Climate-friendly building material Wood is a climate-friendly building material 

Finnforest converts logs, the most valuable part of the trees, into value-added products for the building industry. Smaller trees and by-products of the wood products industry are used to make pulp, board and paper. Bark, tree tops and branches and even stumps can be incinerated to produce energy.

The use of wood in building helps mitigate the climate change in several ways:

• Wood is renewable and recyclable.
• There is not other commonly used building material that requires so little energy to produce and work as wood.
• A log of wood is utilised efficiently. In addition to the actual products, the production processes yield co-products which are valuable raw material for other industrial branches.
• The more wood products replace other materials, the more the so-called substitution effect reduces CO2 in the atmosphere.
• Wood is readily available. Transport distances of raw material are therefore short and emissions from transportation are low.
• Growing trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and this carbon continues to be stored in wooden buildings. There are multitudes of wooden buildings that have served their purpose for hundreds of years, simultaneously acting as carbon storages.
• Wood can often be used to substitute for materials such as steel, aluminium, concrete or plastics, which require non-renewable natural resources and large mounts of energy to produce.
• The cellular structure of wood provides outstanding thermal insulation, which reduces the need for heating wooden buildings.


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