RESEARCH GOALS
To ensure a sustainable future, the EU has set
ambitious targets for 2020. As a natural and
renewable material, wood production could be
an important part of these goals. Aside from
being vital natural habitats, forests provide
many additional environmental benefits.
Crucially, they act as an important carbon
sink, absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere and
converting it to biomass; in fact, just 1 m3 of
wood stores almost 0.9 tonnes of carbon and
substitutes 1.1 tonnes of CO2. All of this means
that, when obtained from well-managed
sources, wood has the potential to address
major environmental challenges.
While it may seem illogical at first, harvesting
more wood could actually benefit the
environment. Harvesting wood for the production
of durable products, such as furniture or
building materials, necessitates more trees and
therefore creates additional carbon stores while
allowing the forest from which the products
came to regenerate and provide new biomass.
In fact, increasing wood product consumption
in Europe by just 4 per cent would remove 150
million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere
each year.
The LIFEWOOD project, supported by the EU’s
LIFE programme, is working towards this. It is
demonstrating an innovative and environmentally
friendly technology for the continuous production
of extremely durable and stable medium-density
fibreboard (MDF).