In the quest for more cost-effective, environmentally-efficient alternatives to historic products, the building industry is, increasingly, substituting plywood for SterlingOSB (Oriented Strand board) in many applications.

Highly versatile and strong, SterlingOSB (Oriented Strand Board), is also a multi-layered timber product but one which is very different from plywood. Instead of being made from alternate sheets of veneer placed at 90 degrees to each other, SterlingOSB is made from layering strands of wood in specific orientations and then bonding the layers with a resin.

As SterlingOSB is made from forest thinnings that are the by-product when the small diameter timber is felled to give the better quality trees space to reach maturity. Plywood manufacture, on the other hand, demands large, premium quality veneer sheets from relatively large diameter trees which can take many years to grow.

“It is generally agreed that SterlingOSB has a lower embodied energy than plywood,” says Doug Lamont, wood fibre manager for SterlingOSB at Norbord Inverness. “Plywood has the highest embodied energy score of the trio due to its higher glue content and greater wastage.”

In today’s market, environmental performance is an important factor in the selection and purchase of building products. Growing public awareness, and the government’s pursuit of sustainable construction methods, means that low environmental impact is increasingly cited as a specification criterion. Other such factors include energy use, water management, site management, health and well being, ecology, waste and pollution.

One example is the use of ‘Ecopoints’ to rate the environmental performance of a proposed residential development. The Ecopoints system, developed by the Building Research Establishment, is an all-embracing environmental assessment procedure that takes account of the embodied energy of the materials used in the construction of a building.

Because of its low environmental impact, SterlingOSB can play a significant part in achieving a good Ecopoints score. In all specification instances, it is worth establishing the environment credentials as not all products are produced to the same high environmental standards or use source materials with good provenance. Being produced in the UK from local, sustainable, FSC accredited timber and produced to the criteria of the environmental standard ISO 14401, it is clear that SterlingOSB can be specified with confidence.