While the cost of construction in the U.S. continues to climb, one building material – wood – remains a smart investment for the savvy professional. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over the last four years, steel products have doubled in price and concrete products are up 35 percent while wood products have declined six percent.
“Structural wood products continue to be a great value, especially in commercial applications where end users face the dilemma of higher costs and in some cases product scarcity,” said Dennis Hardman, president of APA – The Engineered Wood Association, Tacoma, Washington.

McGraw-Hill noted that as of June, steel prices are back into “crisis mode” as the 20-city average is up nearly 15 percent over last year for three types of structural steel and grade-60 rebar. A surge in scrap metal prices and lack of imports are blamed for the latest crisis. This is in sharp contrast to the market for structural wood products, which benefit from a large domestic production and distribution network.
“Wood is ideally suited for low-rise commercial buildings such as resorts, mixed-use offices, schools, healthcare, senior living facilities and adaptive re-use,” said Hardman. Structural plywood, OSB, wood I-joists, glulam beams and dimension lumber also are excellent values, Hardman said, because of their numerous performance advantages, including strength and stiffness (pound for pound wood is stronger than steel), superior performance as a nail base for finish siding materials, high impact resistance, ease of installation and proven durability in all kinds of climates.

Another important consideration that deserves greater weight in environmental debates, Hardman said, is the long-term effects of raw material extraction and manufacture.
“If we view the full life-cycle from cradle to grave, wood products have no equal,” said Hardman. North American forest growth continues to exceed timber harvests by a wide margin. Technological advances have increased the industrial output per unit of wood 40 percent in the last 50 years. Hardman also pointed out that wood products are the only renewable, recyclable structural building material and compare favorably with non-wood products based on such environmental criteria as embodied energy and emissions of carbon dioxide.

“Trees are generated by solar energy, create oxygen and consume carbon dioxide as they mature. To convert the raw wood fiber into useable building products requires only seven percent of the energy required for steel production and 20 percent of the energy required for cement production. And once wood is converted into building products, that carbon is stored. When the building’s useful life is over, nearly all the wood can be recycled,” he added.
Structural engineered wood product formaldehyde emissions are so low that the products are exempt from U.S. HUD and California Air Resources Board (CARB) formaldehyde regulations.