Eco Friendly Decking by Tiger Deck®

An excerpt from "What Makes a Deck Board “Green”?" by Greg Burnet
Professional Deck Builder magazine

[My] customer was an environmentalist and… asked me to investigate the available products and help her select the greenest way to resurface the deck. I ended up focusing on sustainability, environmental impact, embodied energy, lifespan, and what happens to the worn-out product... Maintenance is also something to look at when assessing the long-term impact a particular product can have on the environment… I came down in favor of naturally rot-resistant wood when considering both environmental impact and sustainability. Particularly when the lumber comes from plantations or managed forests, wood’s sustainability can be extremely high... Stricter logging rules and the fact that timber companies usually don’t clear cut forests anymore have minimized the effects of logging… With PVC or composites, sustainability is more of a question, as petroleum is the primary ingredient in those products. Additionally, I found that timber processing uses less energy than does producing a PVC product of similar size and shape. The final consideration, what happens to the worn-out product, seemed to be overlooked by many manufacturers. Naturally rot-resistant wood species, like all vegetable matter, can be recycled or at worst, eventually will revert back to soil… composite materials can’t currently be recycled… Scrap or demolition debris from these products is trucked to a landfill. My customer chose a tropical hardwood product, Tiger Deck.

It’s harvested in Central America and South America, which means it must be shipped several thousand miles, so it does contain a fair amount of embodied energy. On balance, however, other features outweighed that negative one. According to an engineer I spoke with at a wholesale lumber distributor, “tigerwood” is a member of the cashew-tree family, and is very fast growing (sustainable) and extremely decay resistant (long life cycle). It’s said to be grown on plantations and harvested with a minimum of negative environmental impact, and it can be recycled at the end if its lifespan. It was mostly a pleasure to work with. The stock was fairly straight and very uniform. It machined easily and was far lighter than ipe, but still dense.

Greg Burnet is a remodeling contractor and deck builder in Berwyn, Ill.