Monitoring energy efficiency and environmental impact of the woodworking industry in Germany

Abstract

The forest wood chain is affected by the current policy framework in context with environmental and energy related issues in many ways. But since policy instruments interfere with certain parts of the forest-wood chain separately, there is no holistic monitoring installed which follows the development of the complete chain. Especially the development of environmental aspects of the production of wood products is a rather black spot. To include the environmental impact of the woodworking industry in long term evaluations of political decisions taken today, the monitoring of its changes is indispensable. The article presents a monitoring approach which combines comprehensive life cycle inventory data on product level with historical data on sector level. The approach is confirmed to be feasible for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions and the consumption of fossil fuels. The results show that from 2003 until 2012 the sawmill industry increased its average greenhouse gas emissions from 35 to 43 kg CO$_{2}$-eq./m$^{3}$ and the wood based panels industry decreased the emissions from 353 to 325 kg CO$_{2}$-eq./m$^{3}$. In both cases, a change in the product mix of the two sectors was identified to be responsible. However, the results also indicate that both sectors gravely reduced their greenhouse gas efficiency due to a decreasing capacity utilization, which means that the environmental impacts for a specific type of wood product have changed distinctly over time. A comparison of the findings with displacement factors for wood products substitution was conducted to understand the relevance of the results. It showed that the development of environmental aspects of the woodworking industry needs to be taken into account for long term evaluations of political decisions affecting the forest wood chain.