Life Cycle Assessment of Forest-Based Products: A Review

Abstract

Climate change, environmental degradation, and limited resources are motivations for sustainable forest management. Forests, the most abundant renewable resource on earth, used to make a wide variety of forest-based products for human consumption. To provide a scientific measure of a product’s sustainability and environmental performance, the life cycle assessment (LCA) method is used. This article provides a comprehensive review of environmental performances of forest-based products including traditional building products, emerging (mass-timber) building products and nanomaterials using attributional LCA. Across the supply chain, the product manufacturing life-cycle stage tends to have the largest environmental impacts. However, forest management activities and logistics tend to have the greatest economic impact. In addition, environmental trade-offs exist when regulating emissions as indicated by the latest traditional wood building product LCAs. Interpretation of these LCA results can guide new product development using biomaterials, future (mass) building systems and policy-making on mitigating climate change. Key challenges include handling of uncertainties in the supply chain and complex interactions of environment, material conversion, resource use for product production and quantifying the emissions released.

Preparation and Surface Functionalization of Carboxylated Cellulose Nanocrystals

“…Enabling the recycling of reagents would also help in reducing the detrimental environmental impact of these oxidative processes. Finally, little is known on the environmental impact of CNCs as there is no information available on the fate of these entities in the environment nor on life-cycle analysis [ 127 ]. Efforts aiming at addressing these pertinent environmental questions are necessary for all types of CNCs.…”

Change of Income from Forest Products Based on Geographical Location of Enterprises and Some Marketing Variables

“…On the other hand, it has been reported that the effect of aspects like obtaining high revenue in forest products marketing, auction times, the status of forest industry managements and seasonal changes on the prices should be determined with the right strategy (Trømborg et al, 2000). In addition, it is reported that volatile supply and demand in the markets in the future necessitates efforts to increase the flexibility of the forestry sector (Jonsson, 2011;Sahoo et al, 2019;Poudyal et al, 2019). However, it is reported that GDF cannot act independently on pricing of forest products based on market and cost conditions (Daşdemir, 2003).…”

Assessment of the Profitability of Environmental Activities in Forestry

“…The method of evaluating the environmental performance in forestry which is proposed in the research is the result of scientific works in the sphere of accounting and analysis of environmental activities of forestry enterprises [17,40]. No analogues have been found in Ukraine and the world at this time.…”

“…The organizational characteristics of the forestry enterprises are related to the presence of different types and purposes of production processes [40]. However, the accounting system is most influenced by the technological features of the main forestry activity; in particular, the completeness of the technological process (the presence of advanced logging and woodworking production), and high labor capacity (logging) and material capacity (wood processing) availability of primary related products and waste (Figure 4).…”