In the last 15 years, the construction industry has taken a greater interest in sustainable wood products, and for good reason. Each year the planet loses over 70,000 square miles of forest cover, much of it permanently. Beyond scarring the landscape, this deforestation is causing a faster loss of species than at any time in the planet’s history. In addittion, the carbon footprint of illegal deforestation is greater than all automobiles, trucks, planes, trains, and ships combined.

With all this destruction, many people are asking “Why use wood?” The answer is that wood, when responsibly harvested, is by far one of the greenest building materials available. It is renewable, bio-degradable, easy to recycle, and produced primarily with solar energy and rainwater. Unlike concrete, steel, and oil (which is used in the manufacturing of nearly all synthetic flooring products), it does not come from finite resources extracted from the ground which can never be returned to it. The carbon footprint of wood products is far lower than most other building products, and in many cases is either carbon-neutral or carbon-negative. This is because sustainable forestry can actually cause an increase in carbon absorbtion by forests, with more new trees growing in the place of the harvested trees. On the the manufacturing side, the transformation of wood into flooring is significantly less carbon intensive than manufacturing carpet, vinyl, or even stone tile.

For the homeowner or building professional who is considering the sustainability of hardwood floors, perhaps the greatest reason to pick certified hardwood floors is that it literally saves forests. Especially in the tropics, the demand for FSC Certified wood has actually caused previously endangered forests to be privately purchased and protected, often at much more stringent levels of sustainability than neighboring government-operated forests.