The environmental footprint of interior wood doors in non-residential buildings e part 1: life cycle assessment Aline Cobut * , Pierre Blanchet, Robert Beauregard Renewable Materials Research Center, Facult e de foresterie, de g eographie et de g eomatique, Universit e Laval, Qu ebec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada article info Article history: Received 17 August 2013 Received in revised form 23 March 2015 Accepted 21 April 2015 Available online xxx Keywords: Interior wooden doors LCA Ecodesign Non-residential buildings Appearance wood products abstract Integrating environmental aspects into industrial practices has become a necessity. In fact, climate change and resource depletion have been established scientiﬁcally and can no more be neglected. Life Cycle Assessment is acknowledged to be an efﬁcient tool to establish a product environmental proﬁle and can be useful to businesses wishing to analyze their environmental record. Decreasing a building environmental footprint implies, among other considerations, a proper choice of building materials, both structural and architectural. A good avenue would be to select low environmental impact materials from cradle-to-grave. Architectural wooden doors are often speciﬁed in non-residential buildings in North America. However, only one Life Cycle Assessment has been carried out on wooden doors. This study explores the cradle-to-grave environmental proﬁle of an interior wood door in a North American context. According to the results, the main contributor to the product impacts is the production of raw materials, especially the particleboard component, and their transportation to the manufacturing plant. The urea formaldehyde production is the main reason for particleboard impacts among the three damage cate- gories, human health, climate change and resources, of IMPACT 2002þ. The other life cycle stages that have a noticeable inﬂuence on the door environmental impacts are shipping and end-of-life. Trans- portation as a whole affected the system total environmental score. The current results could serve as a basis for ecodesign implementation. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction 1.1. Building ecological footprint The building sector has a large environmental impact when looking at carbon dioxide emissions, energy consumption and material extraction. According to Bribi an et al. (2011) building construction and civil works use 60% of the raw material extracted from the lithosphere and the building sector represents 24% of these global extractions. Moreover, Esin (2007) argues that the impact incurred during the production process of building mate- rials has an important role because of building materials life cycle. Furthermore, among all the main carbon dioxide emitting activ- ities, the building sector is one where practical improvement may have signiﬁcant environment impact reduction, with minimum change in the western world lifestyle (Barker et al., 2007; Levine et al., 2007). This highlights the need for environmentally friendly materials in the building sector. 1.2. Non-residential utilization of appearance wood products in Quebec The government of the Province of Quebec, Canada, expressed in 2008, the intention to promote the use of wood in non-residential buildings (B echard, 2008). In buildings, wood utilization is usually related to structural materials and systems. However, a broad range of wood building materials is employed during ﬁnishing processes, wood ﬂoor covering, wall paneling, ceiling tile, siding, decorative wall paneling, moulding can be listed. Those products have an aesthetical function and they are often used in large volumes. They also show high added value and represent an application of choice for wood products. A study have been published on the development of wood use in non-residential constructions among building professionals in the province of Quebec, Canada (Drouin et al., 2012). From this research, it has been possible to identify the most speciﬁed * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 418 656 2438x2131; fax: þ1 418 656 2091. E-mail addresses: aline.cobut.1@ulaval.ca (A. Cobut), Pierre.blanchet@sbf.ulaval. ca (P. Blanchet), robert.beauregard@sbf.ulaval.ca (R. Beauregard). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.04.079 0959-6526/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Cleaner Production xxx (2015) 1e15 Please cite this article in press as: Cobut, A., et al., The environmental footprint of interior wood doors in non-residential buildings e part 1: life cycle assessment, Journal of Cleaner Production (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.04.079