The next step of manufacturing wood furniture is drying process, which reduces the moisture content of the wood within 15 percent. Drying is a necessary process, which prevent wood from bending and shrinking. Drying process usually takes two to four weeks. Softwoods like pine takes less time to dry and will easily crack during the drying process, while hardwoods such as fruit tree wood need more time to dry because of higher density. Dried wood is available for both construction and furniture manufacturing.
One important environmental impact of drying process is carbon emission, which is the main cause of the global warming . There are two major ways of drying wood: air drying and kiln drying. Kiln drying needs more energy consumption in drying process and air drying needs more energy consumption in haulage process. But overall the carbon emission of kiln drying is 4 times of the air drying (Martínez-Alonso & Lorena Berdasco, 2014). Since kiln drying is more efficient so even through it produces more carbon emission, it is still popular in the wood manufacturing industry. As global warming attracts more and more attentions recently, many countries have scheduled plans for decrease carbon emission. For wood manufacturing industry, our suggestions to reducing carbon emission is using environmental friendly energy for kiln drying like electric power from hydropower station.
(Photo Credit: e_impact)