NWFA leaders have participated in many industry meetings so far this year, including our own Expo, the Hardwood Federation Fly-In, the Decorative Hardwood Association’s (DHA) annual meeting, a new meeting of forestry organizations hosted by the National Hardwood Lumber Association (NHLA), Hardwood Manufacturers Association (HMA), Real American Hardwood Coalition (RAHC), the Federation of European Parquetry (FEP), and a meeting with NWFA members, architects, and designers in New York City set up by PID Floors during its opening event for its new showroom.
While the current economy, lumber markets, wood flooring market ups and downs, interest rates, and more are keeping everyone awake at night, if we look out a few years, the outlook for wood flooring is excellent. Why?
First of all, architects in the states are beginning to follow Europe’s lead, making better environmental decisions about carbon storage in construction by making tall buildings from wood instead of concrete, steel, and natural resources that can be depleted like petroleum, stone, and marble. While this new tall building trend certainly will help grow the Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) market, it also will help the specifying community recognize the value of wood as a building material in general.
And, while architects mostly will be working with CLT in commercial spaces, the positive influence of wood usage in commercial buildings eventually will trickle down through the architectural and design communities, and into residential construction and renovation markets, where wood floors can be poised to prove its sustainability and superior performance to the pros and consumers alike. NWFA is ready to provide the scientific proof to help this sales process along, and you should be too! More on that in a moment…
Secondly, our legislative leaders are obsessed with carbon. Starting with the Biden Administration’s guidelines for voluntary carbon management markets, the federal government is getting serious about cracking down on “purchased credits” and moving toward viable, scientific proof of lessening carbon emissions and storing carbon in natural products. In 2023, the carbon offset market lost 61 percent of its value, falling from nearly $2B in 2022 to $723M in 2023. These schemes do not help mitigate climate change or biodiversity loss, but rather provide a slightly veiled greenwashing for corporations making products that are not carbon friendly.
Our leaders in Washington, D.C., were pleasantly surprised to learn that hardwood trees cut before they start to decay in the forest can store that tree’s carbon in finished goods. Very few of our congressional representatives or senators recognized that letting a tree die naturally in the forest as opposed to managing the forests, releases all of its carbon, whereas turning hardwood into flooring, cabinets, and flooring holds the carbon for the lifetime of the product, sometimes well into its final destination in a landfill.
Enter NWFA and DHA to help you educate your local market on the environmental benefits of wood floors over other products as follows:
Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of Wood Flooring: The NWFA and DHA worked together with an independent researcher to establish a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of wood flooring. LCAs are the language of architects and designers as they specify products based on sustainability. For wood flooring, LCAs specifically look at raw material extraction, primary manufacturing processes into lumber, secondary manufacturing into flooring, transportation, installation, use, life of product, and disposal.
Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs): Data was taken from the LCA to develop two smaller bits for simplicity, called Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs): one for solid wood flooring, the second for engineered wood flooring.
The NWFA Engineered Refinishable Program: The NWFA Engineered Refinishable Program is a voluntary manufacturer certification program that identifies wood floors with wear layers thick enough to be sanded and refinished. Designed to align with European Standards and adopted by the FEP, this program is designed to create a refinishable norm and an easy mark for consumers and flooring sales staff to differentiate wood flooring in comparison to other products.
These environmental programs can be put into your arsenal for clients looking at alternatives, as well as educating architects, designers, builders, and more. We are hard at work developing new CEUs for the A&D community to arm you with education that can utilize the science of wood to be your competitive advantage.
Visit nwfa.org to find the studies and tools on our new “Environmental” tab and to find out how to become a certified presenter for the A&D community, serving as their wood flooring expert that provides CEUs for their own certification requirements on an ongoing basis.