Eco-friendly building materials for new rural residential buildings: preserved wood

With the passage of time and the rapid development of industrialization, forest resources have suffered severe damage. Therefore, the use of wood in construction and wood-structured buildings in China are strictly limited. Many materials can be used for rural residential construction; the most common are bricks, tiles, ash, sand, stone, and cement. Although these materials are commonplace, they are damaging to the natural ecological environment. The widespread use of ecological building materials should be strongly promoted in areas with beautiful ecological environments.
Wooden Ecological Building Materials

Timber

Timber, including wood-based materials, is favored not only for its natural origin and renewability but also for its many advantages. The scent of wood can lower blood pressure and reduce stress. Wood is resistant to corrosion and mildew and regulates humidity. Wood has outstanding acoustic properties, low thermal conductivity, and dampens vibrations. Dried wood is resistant to deformation and can be easily processed. Using wood to build houses reduces significant CO2 emissions during construction, contributing to environmental protection.

Wood-structured Building Materials

Composite materials suitable for wood-structured buildings, both wood and non-wood, include structural plywood, veneer lumber, engineered lumber, oriented strand board, parallel strand lumber, large flake particleboard, and agricultural crop straw composite wall materials.

Cement Particleboard

Timber is a natural organic material and a long-standing traditional building material. Cement is a traditional building adhesive. Combined with wood shavings or other plant stem fragments as raw materials, along with a small amount of chemical reagents and water, it is processed through laying, pressing, heating, curing, drying, and trimming into a new type of building board. This board combines the advantages of wood and cement: high strength, water resistance, fire resistance, good insulation, frost resistance, resistance to biological decay, and non-pollution. It can be mechanically processed (planed, sawn, drilled, nailed) and decorated on the surface. Cement particleboard can be widely used in non-load-bearing interior and exterior wall panels, floors, ceilings, building formwork, mobile homes, and packaging boards, especially suitable for various lightweight frame buildings.

Fir Engineered Lumber

Although wood-structured buildings have many advantages, in the early stages of human use of wood, only natural forests were felled, resulting in a significant reduction in forest area. With the increasing scarcity of large-diameter natural forest resources, they have been replaced by low-quality forests mainly composed of artificially grown fast-growing small-diameter trees. Therefore, it is necessary to implement a policy of "optimizing the use of inferior materials and saving materials" to compensate for the shortage of large-diameter and high-quality timber. The development of fir engineered lumber aligns with the direction of forest industry development. Traditional wooden buildings can also be repaired using engineered lumber to replace precious high-quality hardwood.

In the field of construction, wood-structured buildings have advantages such as low processing costs, fast construction speed, low energy consumption, good environmental benefits, and sustainability. Therefore, wood and its products have become one of the main materials for house construction in developed Western countries.