Is Southern Pine "green"?

Which statement do you think is true?

a. Nine out of ten homes built today are built with wood.

b. Wood is the best insulator against heat and cold.

c. The US has more trees today than it did 75 years ago.

d. All of the above

If you answered d, you've done your homework. Wood is the building material of choice for several reasons:

Energy Efficiency:

• Wood doesn't conduct heat and cold (steel and concrete do), so homes constructed with wood framing require less energy to heat and cool, reducing total energy costs.
• One inch of wood is 15 times as efficient an insulator as concrete, 400 times as efficient as steel, and 1,770 times as efficient as aluminum.

A Proven History of Performance

• Wood offers centuries of strength, durability, dependability and beauty. Southern Pine wood products have been around for more than 300 years: the first Southern Pine sawmill was built in 1609 in Jamestown.
• The most affordable building material on the market today? Wood.
• Wood is easier to use than other options.

The Environmental Choice

• Wood is the only renewable building material. The only one. Wood can be recycled. Wood can be regenerated.
• Increasing our forest lands increases our health: while trees grow, they consume carbon dioxide and release oxygen.
• Which building product produces the least amount of greenhouse gas emissions: steel, concrete or wood? You guessed it: wood.
• Wood products make up 47 percent of all US-made raw materials, yet its energy consumption during production is only four percent. Plus, wood can be disposed of with no danger to the environment.
• Non-wood building products are environmentally expensive: finite supplies of ores and petroleum mean when they're gone, they're gone. An endless source of trees, less energy to produce and decreased air pollution make wood the environmentally friendly choice.
• Growing just one pound of wood in a vigorous younger forest removes 1.47 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replaces it with 1.07 pounds of life-sustaining oxygen. Carbon dioxide accounts for about half of the world's greenhouse gases, which trap solar rays.

Our Forests
Are we running out of trees and forest lands? No.

• Billions of trees are planted each year to grow and sustain our forest lands nationwide. These forests are managed by certified foresters who use sound science to make decisions on how to best use the land.
• In fact, more wood is grown each year than is used in building materials or lost to disease, insects and fire.
• About one-third of the US, approximately 747 million acres, is covered in forests.
• Forests in North America have expanded by 10 million acres since 1990.
• The South is responsible for 214 million acres of the US' forests.