Wood furniture is incredibly attractive to many people for a wide variety of reasons. For one, it’s stylish. Wood furniture can fit in with just about any scheme of decor. It’s great for a rustic look, as well as for more of an industrial one. And wood pieces of furniture, even if they don’t make up the majority of your home furnishings, can be used for stylish accent pieces – and even, in some cases, art installations – as well. From rustic furniture to wood restaurant tables, wood is truly everywhere.
And on top of being stylish, wood furniture tends to be high quality and long lasting as well. If you buy wood furniture, you can expect to have it for at least ten years, if you so choose. For many people, their wood furniture lasts even longer. And wood structures and furniture have been around for quite some time, with the oldest all wood building in the world (that also has multiple levels) dating back to the year of 1056, when it was constructed in China. Today, the Pagod of Fogong Temple still stands an impressive two hundred and twenty one feet, showing off the potential longevity of wood.
But there can certainly be downsides to using wood in so much of what we build. For one, wood is being consumed much faster than it is being created. As your typical hardwood tree can take as many as sixty years to fully mature – and certainly no less than forty years in your typical case – it is unreasonable to expect that simply planting new trees will or can account for the trees that have been lost to rapid deforestation.
And we are certainly consuming a great deal of wood, with the country of the United States alone milling as many as three trillion board feet of lumber in the less than one hundred and fifty years that have passed since the year of 1900. In the years that come next, this number is, unfortunately, only likely to continue to climb and climb. And a great deal of wood goes to waste.
At the typical construction site here in the United States, wood is one of the most wasted products at the end of any given construction project. In fact, up to thirty percent of waste left over at any given site will be wood, and this is something that is difficult to change. Fortunately, methods of modular construction are growing, and the need for wood in these projects is far less significant than the need for wood when traditional methods of construction are used instead.
Aside from this, wood products can also be recycled, with more than two and a half million tons of wood pallets recycled in the year of 2015 alone, a number that has only grown in the years that have transpired since. This wood and other types of wood that are recycled can be repurposed and sold again as reclaimed wood. For many, reclaimed wood presents an ethical way to consume wood products without hurting our environment, something that now more than ever we all need to work to protect.
And from the reclaimed wood table top to the reclaimed wood paneling to the reclaimed wood chairs, reclaimed wood comes in just about anything you could want. And when we look at reclaimed wood products such as the aforementioned reclaimed wood table top, we find that such a product as the reclaimed wood table top has many practical uses. A reclaimed wood table top, for instance, can be used in a restaurant setting – but the reclaimed wood table top could also be used in a home. The reclaimed wood table top could even be used in a professional space, as a conference table, perhaps.
But aside from the reclaimed wood table top, there are so many possibilities when it comes to using reclaimed wood. There are even many different varieties of wood out there, so much so that you are almost guaranteed to find the reclaimed wood that suits your style – and it won’t hurt the environment to do so.