Sustainable Harvests Ensure Our Future
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BY KEITH CHRISTMAN
eal engineered hardwood products including engineered wood flooring, wall panels, cabinets and furniture make efficient use of trees which are a renewable resource. In fact, using wood products ensures the health of our forests, prevents them from being converted to other uses and stores carbon to mitigate climate change. These decorative hardwood products are typically made using veneers. Veneer is an extremely thin sheet of rich-colored hardwood, usually thinner than 1/8 of an inch, cut and matched in a pattern to be applied to a more durable and less expensive surface. This method helps manufacturers build and design beautiful products including furniture at a lower cost for consumers, meaning we can make more beautiful hardwoods while using fewer of the best trees and saving money.
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SURFACEANDPANEL.COM
The predominate North American Hardwood species are maple, cherry, red or white oak, hickory, ash, alder, walnut, and poplar. The good news about using real hardwood is that it is an abundant resource — and it is growing. In fact, a nationwide inventory mandated under U.S. Federal law (required every 10 years), shows that U.S. hardwood forests are not only growing in size and timber volume but that existing forest management practices are contributing to enhanced forest health and diversity. Nearly all commercial hardwoods in U.S. forests have demonstrated rapid growth in volume throughout the United States. According to the most recent statistics released by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA): Between 1953 and 2017 the volume of U.S. hardwood growing stock increased from 5.2 billion cubic meters to 12.0 billion cubic meters, a gain of more than 130 percent.