The National Wood Flooring Association (NWFA) signed a memorandum of agreement (MOA) with the United States Forest Service (USFS) to support the creation of a publicly accessible platform to provide transparent, high-integrity forest and wood product carbon data.
The platform will include six measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification tools that align with a USFS objective to serve as the primary source of information on carbon and carbon flows across U.S. forest lands, harvested wood products, and end-use life cycle assessment. Currently, forest and wood product data exist in disparate sources. Connections and improvements are necessary to produce standardized data and approaches for quantifying forest-sector greenhouse gas flux for entities across the value chain.
This platform will:
- Provide high-quality carbon data on forests and wood products, enabling consistent holistic reporting at three starting points: the landowner, manufacturer, and end-user.
- Combine Forest Inventory Analysis data and other non-proprietary sources of forest sector inventory data with tools, technologies, and approaches to enable forest owners to determine the forest carbon stock impacts of forest management regimes for various forest types or species compositions.
- Use published manufacturing environmental product declarations (EPDs), life cycle assessments (LCAs), and USDA entity level guidance to report the embodied (emissions associated with materials or construction processes) carbon in wood products, calculate the embedded (stored) carbon in manufactured products, and estimate the carbon displacement of wood products using substitution factors.
The forest sectors are creating a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership to collaborate in the development of the digital platform. The MOA outlines USFS and partner commitments of staffing, resources, access to data, and technical assistance towards building the platform and its consistent tools. USDA has committed $4 million in funding, with $1 million provided by the U.S. Endowment.
Michael Martin, president and CEO of NWFA, attended the MOA signing ceremony in Washington, D.C. last week. Other organizations partnering on this project include the American Forest Foundation, the National Alliance of Forest Owners, The American Wood Council, the Hardwood Federation, the Decorative Hardwoods Association, the National Wooden Pallet and Container Association, the National Hardwood Lumber Association, and the Hardwood Manufacturers Association.
The NWFA and the Decorative Hardwoods Association (DHA) worked together with an independent researcher to establish a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of wood flooring. Looking from cradle-to-grave, this included resource extraction, resource transportation, manufacturing of products, transportation of products, installation of products, use, disposal at the end of life, and potential benefits beyond system boundaries.
This research allowed for comprehensive Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for wood flooring products. EPDs are a means to verify a productās environmental impacts by providing data that quantifies how a product is made and its effects on the environment throughout its entire life cycle. The results revealed that solid and engineered wood flooring possess a considerably smaller carbon footprint, or Global Warming Potential, than all other flooring categories.