Wood is an essential product here in the United States, as well as in many other places all throughout the world as a whole. After all, wood is incredibly versatile and can be used for many different things, from the creation of paper products to the building of homes and commercial buildings to even the creation of rustic elements of design, to name just a few. But wood waste here in the United States is becoming a critical problem, and one that must be addressed sooner rather than later.
After all, over the course of the last 120 or so years (since the year of 1900, to be more specific), as many as three trillion feet of board lumber has been milled – not throughout the world, but by the United States alone. With new wood being used every single day, the growing amount of wood that we use is becoming a problem, especially when you consider that more than one quarter of all the waste that is generated by every construction site is nothing else except wood waste, meaning that a lot of perfectly good wood is simply being thrown away.
Fortunately, there are a number of steps that we can take to prevent too many trees from being cut down – and to prevent the forests that cover more than one quarter of our Earth from becoming too much further depleted. For one, we can plant new trees, something that is most certainly an important step towards sustainability and the overall health of our planet not just here in the United States but all throughout the world as a whole. But this is not the only solution that needs to be implemented, something that many people all too erroneously think.
Unfortunately, hardwood trees take a good deal of time to reach full maturity, sometimes as many as 60 years. Even the fastest growing of hardwood trees won’t be fully mature until at least 20 years has passed by. Of course, this means that trees are being cut down faster that they can grow, so recycling must also be implemented alongside planting these trees, as important as this step is to take. Happily, more is being recycled than ever before, with more than two and a half million tons of wood pallets recycled over the course of the year of 2015 alone – a number that has only continued to grow and grow in the years that have followed it.
Of course, reclaimed wood products like reclaimed spruce products are also on the rise, competing with new wood products and often winning out. After all, reclaimed wood like reclaimed spruce is still highly aesthetically pleasing and many people find that the quality of reclaimed spruce and other types of reclaimed wood is really just as high in quality as new wood products are. And reclaimed spruce can be made into a wide variety of products, from reclaimed spruce wood tabletops for restaurants to reclaimed spruce wood siding. For many people, reclaimed spruce is likely to be even difficult to separate from new wood spruce, making reclaimed spruce and other types of reclaimed wood a great alternative to the rampant use of new wood that is all too commonplace in the world as we know it.
And this reclaimed spruce can cultivate the ideal aesthetic that people are searching for just as well as new wood can. The rustic style is still big here in the United States, and the use of reclaimed spruce can add a little bit of it – or a lot of it, depending on your preferences – into your own home. For many people, the use of reclaimed wood like reclaimed spruce can actually even be less expensive than if they were to use new wood, meaning that the use of reclaimed woods such as reclaimed spruce is truly hugely beneficial all across the board, from an environmental standpoint as well as from a financial one – two components that many people care about here in the United States.
