A life cycle and product type based estimator for quantifying the carbon stored in wood products
Date
2023-01-23
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Publisher
Springer Nature
Abstract
Background
Timber harvesting and industrial wood processing laterally transfer the carbon stored in forest sectors to wood products creating a wood products carbon pool. The carbon stored in wood products is allocated to end-use wood products (e.g., paper, furniture), landfill, and charcoal. Wood products can store substantial amounts of carbon and contribute to the mitigation of greenhouse effects. Therefore, accurate accounts for the size of wood products carbon pools for different regions are essential to estimating the land-atmosphere carbon exchange by using the bottom-up approach of carbon stock change.
Results
To quantify the carbon stored in wood products, we developed a state-of-the-art estimator (Wood Products Carbon Storage Estimator, WPsCS Estimator) that includes the wood products disposal, recycling, and waste wood decomposition processes. The wood products carbon pool in this estimator has three subpools: (1) end-use wood products, (2) landfill, and (3) charcoal carbon. In addition, it has a user-friendly interface, which can be used to easily parameterize and calibrate an estimation. To evaluate its performance, we applied this estimator to account for the carbon stored in wood products made from the timber harvested in Maine, USA, and the carbon storage of wood products consumed in the United States.
Conclusion
The WPsCS Estimator can efficiently and easily quantify the carbon stored in harvested wood products for a given region over a specific period, which was demonstrated with two illustrative examples. In addition, WPsCS Estimator has a user-friendly interface, and all parameters can be easily modified.
Description
© The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. The Version of Scholarly Record of this Article is published in Carbon Balance and Management, 2023, available online at: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13021-022-00220-y . Keywords: carbon pool; carbon storage; estimator; life cycle; recycle; wood products.
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Citation
Wei, X., Zhao, J., Hayes, D.J. et al. A life cycle and product type based estimator for quantifying the carbon stored in wood products. Carbon Balance Manage 18, 1 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13021-022-00220-y