What is wood?

Wood is created through a chemical process called photosynthesis. In basic terms, forests capture the energy of sunlight and produce sugar by combining carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the air with water that's been absorbed from the soil by the roots. This sugar provides the energy and basic chemical building blocks that plants and trees need to produce all of the complex molecules that make up stems, leaves, roots and wood.

Growing trees add a new ring of wood to their circumference every year and this wood is about 50 per cent carbon by weight. In sum, carbon-based molecules are the basic building blocks of wood and, without CO₂, trees could not form the woody biomass that makes up their trunks and branches.

When manufactured into wood products, the carbon is essentially inert and stable, and continues to be kept out of the atmosphere for the lifetime of the product-or longer, if the product is recycled for another use.

When used for bio-energy, the woody biomass is considered carbon neutral because it releases no more carbon into the atmosphere than it absorbed during its lifetime and does so in a relatively short life cycle.