Wood for Good commended at the 2degrees Champions Awards

Wood for Good, the timber industry sustainability and communications campaign, was presented with the “Highly Commended” certificate at the 2degrees Champions Awards 2015 for its Build with Carbon: Don’t Emit It! campaign.

Judges of the awards, which recognise the individuals and companies driving sustainable business, highlighted the campaign as one of the most impressive entries in its external communications category.

The campaign, developed in partnership with Carbon Visuals, aimed to promote the use of timber-frame construction in the delivery of new homes. It was centred on a series of three videos designed to visualise the size of one tonne of carbon dioxide at normal atmospheric pressure, and to illustrate how this CO2 is captured by trees and stored in timber products.

The videos explained the benefits of using timber-framed methods in helping the UK meet its housing and climate change goals by showing that the UK could capture and store nearly 4 million tonnes of CO2 annually in new-build alone if 200,000 new homes were built every year using these methods.

David Hopkins, executive director at Wood for Good, said: “We’re very grateful to the 2degrees community of sustainability professionals for voting for our campaign. It is good to see the timber industry gain recognition and be ranked alongside other mainstream industry activity. We’re clearly having an impact.”

“There’s a widely held misconception that creating sustainable homes takes longer and is more expensive than traditional build.”

“Through the Build with Carbon campaign, we demonstrated the carbon capture mechanism of commercial forestry and the extent to which the timber products harvested from this process could cost-effectively and sustainably store that carbon and also help to solve the UK’s housing shortage.

“By explaining this narrative through the animations, which we took to a range of conferences and articles across a variety of media titles, we were able to drive awareness of the timber sector as a low-carbon economic driving force to decision makers across the country.”

For more details on the awards, visit the 2degrees network website: https://www.2degreesnetwork.com/awards/