Wood Use

WOOD UTILIZATION

Pound for pound, wood is stronger than steel. Unlike steel, it is also resilient. This combination of strength and resiliency gives wood the ability to absorb the shock of heavy loads providing a greater margin of safety than many other materials.

The conversion cost of wood--the cost of manufacturing products from the raw material--is much less than for any other material. The expenditure of energy for conversion is also less when converting wood. Both these factors are important to potential users who are making
decisions on material selection. In construction of dwellings, architects consider that wood has more than 10 times the insulating capability of steel or aluminum and is five times more effective as an insulator than concrete or cinder block.

Wood and wood-based products are the most important of all man's resources for three main reasons. First, wood is universal. It is a raw material that can satisfy almost every requirement or existence. It provides food for man and animals. It is one of the world's most important
sources of textile fibers. Wood is capable of producing motor fuels and lubricants. As a building material, wood yields an astonishing variety of plywoods, plastic and wood fiber products that can meet any engineering specification.

Second, wood is abundant. More than eight billion acres, one quarter of the total earth's surface, are forested. The known deposits of oil, iron ore, coal and other minerals are extremely scarce compared to the wood fiber available. Only a small fraction of the world's forest resources is being utilized. An acre of good forest can grow, annually, several times as much fiber as cotton and as much sugar as the same soil planted in sugar beets.

Third, the wood resource is inexhaustible. The forest is not a mine that will be depleted, but a crop...provided that trees are harvested as a crop and the forest is sustained by proper management.

THE UTILITY OF WOOD
One of nature's greatest gifts to mankind is wood. No other material has provided so much through the centuries. Not only does it provide food, shelter, energy for warmth and cooking, clothing, tools and 10,000 other products, but it renews itself naturally. Had we not been
provided this wonderful resource, we would have been forced to invent it. Trees take our waste carbon dioxide and provide the much needed oxygen our world requires for life.

Think of all the consumer products made of wood. If you add all those products that are made by processing wood into other materials, the numbers are astonishing. Products made from wood fiber include all kinds of paper and board materials, cabinets, decorative woodwork, mouldings, beautiful furniture, construction materials, sports equipment, parts for weaving and knitting mills, flooring, home building, rayon and other fibers, tanning chemicals and thousands of other products that touch our lives daily.

Different products require different kinds of trees, but in general, a cord of wood (a stack of wood 4' x 4' x 8') can produce any of the following:

	7,500,000 toothpicks
	1,000 to 2,000 pounds of paper (depending on the process)
	942 one pound books
	61,370 standard #10 business envelopes
	4,384,000 commemorative-size postage stamps
	460,000 personal checks
	87,870 sheets of bond stationery (8 1/2 by 11)
	1,200 copies of National Geographic magazine
	2,700 copies of the average daily paper (36 pages)
	250 copies of a typical Sunday New York Times
	30 Boston Rockers
	12 dining room tables (each table seats 8)

WOOD FOR CONSTRUCTION
Building an average 1,900 sq.ft. home uses 11,000 board feet of lumber and up to 5,000 board feet of panel products. (A board foot is a one inch board, 12" in width and 12" in length.)