”No one is willing to pay for ecology,” is how Mr. Jaakko Länsiluoto, Development and Planning Manager for the Finnforest company, summed up the attitudes of their customers, that is, builders.

Länsiluoto, one of the presenters at a seminar organised in Helsinki by the Forest Foresight Unit of the University of Eastern Finland, said that ecology is considered an accessory. He reviewed an inquiry among Finnforest’s customers about good selling arguments.

It transpired that ecology is seen as an expensive accessory which is not sought for. Overall, wooden structures are thought expensive, even though their cost-effectiveness is undisputed in small-scale dwellings.

Neither is ecology seen as a selling argument in marketing. “Even though ecological performance had been stressed in planning the experimental housing areas I examined, it did not end up in the builders’ advertisements for selling the properties,” said Ms. Päivi Timonen, Research Director at the National Consumer Research Centre.

The ads stressed spatial solutions, interior decoration options and aesthetical aspects, for example. “Construction companies regard the consumers as decorators,” Timonen summed up.

”No one is interested in the origin of steel”
Still, wood is the only building material whose environmental effects are considered at all in international debate.

“Wood has to be certified, but no one asks about the conditions steel is manufactured in or where cement comes from,” says Mr. Mikko Viljakainen, Director for Building with Wood at the Finnish Forest Industries Federation.

Viljakainen feels strongly that the choice of construction materials matters.

“The ecological footprint of the construction business is huge, and it will grow if nothing’s done. Construction takes up about half of the use of natural resources and creates 40 percent of all waste. Construction will increase due to migration, growth in welfare and population: the world’s population grows by 100 million people every year. ”

”Wood use has indisputable climate benefits”
”Judging by research reports, the use of wood seems to have undisputable climate benefits compared to other construction materials,” said Mr. Kim Pingoud, Senior Research Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

One question in the climate debate has been whether it is better to leave forests standing to absorb carbon or to fell the trees, plant a new forest and use the timber to make wood products.

According to Pingoud, the answer depends on the products and the time perspective.

”In an acute situation, it can be sensible to leave the forests standing to sequester carbon. In the long run, it is more sensible to fell the trees, plant a new forest and manufacture long-life wooden products of the timber, and then recycle them for energy at the end of their life cycle,” Pingoud said.

The best situation is when the carbon storages in both the forests and the wood products increase and the wood is used to replace other materials that cause more emissions.

Wood would benefit from the proposed assessment
During the seminar Viljakainen proposed that an assessment of their environmental performance would be made of public buildings.

The assessment would take into consideration the environmental burden caused by the construction and use of the building.

There being no question of its environmental friendliness, wood could only benefit from such an assessment, Viljakainen says. ”Environmental friendliness should not cost more. The more strain to the environment a product or solution causes, the more it should cost.”

The seminar participants considered the proposal a good one. Mr. Ari Martonen, wood products entrepreneur at Bizco Partners, felt it was even revolutionary.

An environmental performance assessment would be a good political tool for directing construction on to a more environmentally friendly path and for influencing the conservative construction sector.

A look at the list of participants shows that no representatives of construction firms seemed to be present in the seminar.

By Krista Kimmo



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