If you specify solid wooden floors, which have a very long
lifespan, you will be “locking up” carbon for the life of the floor. This cycle of lifetime carbon collection (also known as sequestration) and release does not increase the total amount of carbon in the environment, and this is why timber is often referred to as a carbon neutral material. This is quite different from the way carbon is bound up in plastics and other crude oil derived materials, such as synthetic floor coverings. Use of crude oil derived products ultimately increases global warming because when they are disposed of carbon is released into the atmosphere that would otherwise have remained locked underground, resulting in a net increase in global warming. For the same reason we are moving away from fossil derived energy sources such as coal and gas. If you want to find out how much embodied carbon a product or material contains, and its effect on global warming, the best information source is an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD). An EPD is a lifetime assessment, from raw materials, manufacturing, to final disposal or recycling. This last factor is one which makes solid hardwood floors attractive to sustainable building designers because they can be refurbished many times over, can often be repurposed, and have a long service life. We are seeing trends towards re-using older buildings rather than new build. Most of the embodied carbon in a building is contained in its structure and foundations, so it makes little sense to demolish and dispose of the existing structure, only to replace it with new. If you do this, you are releasing the embodied carbon from the old
building (bad for global warming) and then replacing it with new concrete and steel which creates yet more embodied carbon. Anyone who is involved with construction or estate management will benefit from keeping abreast of this increasingly hot topic, as this will help us to face the global warming challenges that lie ahead.
JQ214
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