As environmental awareness grows, societal demand for more environmentally friendly products increases. Demand for environmental responsibility also reached the building material and construction sector. Green building has become more widespread over the past decade and can be considered a challenge for specifiers and building products manufacturers. Ecodesign, an application of the sustainable development concept, is one of the available tools to address this challenge. This article aims at proposing an ecodesign pathway for appearance wood products in the nonresidential building sector. Through extrapolating results from a previous interior wood door case study, it has been possible to obtain environmental profiles for the main segments of the appearance wood products family for nonresidential buildings. These profiles have allowed devising ecodesign solutions. Results show that for this whole family of products, raw materials are what cause the most environmental impacts, followed by shipping and end-of-life stages. Product component weight tends also to influence the environmental profile. Ecodesign solutions for composite-based products are strongly related to decreasing the composite component weight by design and remanufacturing. For solid wood-based products, ecodesign can be approached through remanufacturing or reclaiming, using locally certified sustainable wood. The use of hardwood waste may be available for energy purposes, but this may not be as relevant as reuse and recycle in the context of the province of Quebec energy grid mix.

Ecodesign is a concept that emerged few decades ago as a response to the larger concept of sustainable development. Multiple tools exist to address ecodesign. Life Cycle Assessment, a comprehensive, robust and recognized evaluation tool, enables to identify the product environmental profile. Based on previous LCA results on interior wood doors, this paper aims at proposing an ecodesign strategy based on the generation and evaluation of alternative scenarios. The three selected targets for environmental improvement are particleboard components, transportation and end-of-life. For the particleboard manufacturing, the use of adhesives based on bio-sourced resources was not very conclusive, except for the use of pine tannins in panel manufacture that showed promising results. Concerning transportation issues, switching from road to rail transportation, as well as having a local supplier, decreased the overall environmental impact of the door. The most notable alternative was the end-of-life recycling scenario. The reutilization of the door core in the door manufacturing process proved a great benefit due to the avoidance of new raw materials production. Developing services around door recovery and remanufacturing seems promising in reducing doors environmental impacts. This scenario would be readily viable and realistic.

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 categories, human health, climate change and resources, of IMPACT 2002+. The other life cycle stages that have a noticeable influence on the door environmental impacts are shipping and end-of-life. Transportation as a whole affected the system total environmental score. The current results could serve as a basis for ecodesign implementation.

Growing public concern about the current state of our planet led to the creation of numerous regulations, standards, and certifications for the protection of humans and the environment. Ecolabels were defined for products such as cleaning products, paints, and many others. Wood building products are no exception. The objective of this study is to analyze the existing ecolabelling programs for appearance wood products in nonresidential applications and to evaluate them relatively to their effective role in environment protection or reduction of environment footprint.