Responsible Use

Every year, society’s appetite for materials increases. A growing world population and expanding industrialization is driving raw material extraction to an increasingly unsustainable rate.

Industrialized countries—particularly the United States—are disproportionately large consumers. People in industrialized countries comprise only about 20 percent of the global population, yet they consume 81 percent of the world’s paper and 76 percent of its timber. The average American now consumes twice as many goods and services as in 1950. Sustaining world consumption at the same rate as America would require three times the land on Earth!

Contributing to the unsustainable rise in materials consumption is the overwhelming demand for wood products. Global wood consumption is projected to increase by at least 20 percent by 2010 and by more than 50 percent by 2050.

The drastic rise in wood consumption propels the depletion of the world’s forests. Nearly a fifth of the earth’s forested areas have been cleared since 1950 alone. Industries that benefit from logging tout the benefits of tree plantations, identifying trees a renewable resource. In reality, however, 10 times more forests are lost globally each year than are gained through regrowth—a net destruction of 40 million acres annually. Moreover, tree plantations ignore the unique benefit of natural forests—biodiversity, carbon storage and climate control, flood control, soil conservation and other benefits.

The excessive consumption of wood causes environmental problems at every step from logging natural forests and destroying watersheds to the pollution that results in transporting and manufacturing forest products to the dumping of useful materials in landfills. There are many steps we can all take to reduce the consumption of raw materials, and in this case, wood and wood products.  To conserve the world’s forests, we must reinvent our relationship with wood use.