Wood products for the italian construction industry – an lca-based sustainability evaluation

First, from our point of view, LCA is definitively the most effective tool to measure environmental impacts. Second, in order to compare different construction products (how much wood and other products are green) we have to assess them as part of the whole Life Cycle Impact of the buildings they will be part of. Nevertheless, to do this, we need reliable effective data. Life Cycle Assessment, in fact, is a bit more complicated, for wood: tree species, yield of forest, time from planting trees to log harvest, harvesting procedure, length and width of forest roads or total area and land use have a strong influence on the environmental results. Other questions concern local electricity profile and national transport policies, the local procedures for wood wastes (disposal or energy recover) at the end of life of a building and the same choice of the functional unit for the many impacts. For these reasons, standardized data are not yet available, as well as average world-wide data, from the most diffused LCA databases, are very likely different from real product characteristics. The aim of the study is to report the results of the assessment (LCA method) of an Italian “short chain” manufacturing unit for wood-based construction products. To get to this point, we had to face all the methodological questions for the assessment of the Life Cycle of a wood product, from data gathering to the choice of the most proper end of life scenario. The first result is a methodological answer: how to measure actual carbon storage and positive environmental performance of wood. The second is a reference for local-wood based products and a comparison of our results with standard EU and OECD, in order to quantify “short chain” consequences on environmental impacts.