Environmental attributes of wood products: context and relevance for U.S. architects.

Abstract

Changing specifier preferences regarding the use and function of construction materials may greatly affect the consumption of wood products. Since architects are often involved in the selection of materials, they were selected for this research. A national survey of 1,200

architect office owners was conducted in order to investigate their environmental concerns and other design criteria regarding wood products. The study also identified the different degrees of effectiveness of several environmental actions taken by wood products companies. According to architects, the design attribute environmentally sustainable is of medium importance, regardless of the product group (the study defined three product groups: structural; appearance; and engineered wood products). Third-party environmental certification proved to be the most effective environmental action. Communication campaigns are surprisingly effective, suggesting that additional environmental advertising efforts by wood products companies might be beneficial. The results of the study suggest that advertising tailored to architects should have a dual purpose, stressing both a quality or appearance feature and an environmental one. Importantly, the quality or appearance issue changes depending on the product group. In that respect, "uniform quality" of the material is an important quality feature in both the structural and the engineered wood product groups.

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Previous research has revealed an important substitution of wood by other materials in the U.S. residential construction industry (Eastin et al. 2001). Consistently, the Wood Promotion Network has reported that steel and concrete have made significant gains against wood in residential construction. Steel wall framing and poured concrete floors have increased market share between 1997 and 2000, whereas wood lost an average 2.5 percent market share in walls, floors, and roofs during the same period (WPN 2001). The market share loss costs the wood industry at least $270 million in revenue per year. Therefore, it is important to identify causes for wood product substitution, and at the same time determine ways of coping with this problem. This paper reports findings regarding the environmental concerns and related characteristics of U.S. architects, proposed as an important customer group of wood products companies, and provides specific suggestions regarding the content of environmental advertising targeting this group. We advocate that an improvement in the environmental image of wood products would reduce wood products substitution, as has already been advanced by other authors (Eastin et al. 2001).

Customer group selection

The construction industry is a very important consumer of wood products. New residential and non-residential construction added up to 46 percent of U.S. sawn softwood usage in the year 2000 (UNECE 2001). Thus, the evolving preferences of those who specify construction materials may greatly affect the consumption of wood products. These specifiers may include architects, construction firms/contractors, owners, and structural engineers. Most new homes and apartments are built prior to sale, therefore the owner of a new home may not have much influence on material selection. Construction firms, architects, and structural engineers, however, interact in the material selection process.

We selected architects as the key customer group in this research effort for several reasons. First, 14 in-person interviews with architects and civil engineers proved that these professional groups are very influential in the material specification process of construction projects of medium and large size. Architects are especially prominent in projects where there is intent to differentiate, like high-end condominiums, corporate headquarters, showrooms, etc. Conversely, the importance of civil engineers grows in industrial projects.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Second, architects and civil engineers generate the blueprints that largely determine the materials to be used. There are typical materials for certain uses, like wood framing in the case of single-family homes. However, some U.S. architects are now specifying steel studs instead of wood studs for house framing, due to both dimensional stability and the belief that steel is more environmentally friendly than wood. In other words, architects can push material substitution to some extent, especially if costs are similar for alternative materials.

Third, the prominence of these two groups of specifiers, architects and civil engineers, prompted us to conduct conjoint and cluster analyses in earlier stages of this research to determine differences among the material preferences of these two professional groups. The results of the study were conclusive. Architects and civil engineers are very similar regarding material preferences, as was also found by Kozak and Cohen (1999). The only difference stemmed from environmental issues, which are far more important for architects than for civil engineers.

Finally, we were interested in measuring the environmental preferences of one of the parties involved in the selection of materials for construction projects. Architects are seen to be environmentally conscious specifiers of construction materials, and were therefore an appropriate group for this research (IIDA 1999, Wagner and Hansen 2002).

Conceptual framework

The environmental characterization of architects reported in this paper is part of a bigger project that seeks to improve the customer orientation of wood products companies by combining information about customer needs and company competitive advantages. Competitive advantage is "... the basis on which customers will choose your product over the competitor's ... (Winer 1999).

Figure 1 shows the conceptual framework for the entire investigation. The boxes with underlined text show the focus of this article. In the overall study, customer needs are compared with company competitive advantages using a quality technique known as quality function deployment (QFD) (Cohen 1995). QFD is one of the tools developed under the concept of total quality management (TQM). TQM can be defined as a set of models and tools for getting all employees involved in continuous improvement of aspects important to the customer (Day 1994). In a traditional QFD application, customer needs are compared with design parameters of products still in the design stage, in order to discover those features of products that will most likely satisfy customer requirements. In this study, customer needs are compared to companies' competitive advantages. Importantly, the use of QFD requires the use of only one customer group (Cohen 1995). As was already discussed, we have selected architects as the key customer group in this research effort.

This article focuses on the methodology and results of the initial part of the study, i.e., the determination of the customer (architect) needs, specifically analyzing their environmental preferences regarding wood products. Subsequent stages of the research will provide the main set of competitive advantages identified by the industry through interviews with managers of wood products companies. Finally, an expert team will fill in the relationship matrix, determining the association between each customer need termed "Voice of the Customer" and each competitive advantage termed "Voice of the Company" in QFD (Bossert 1991). The relationship matrix will allow identification of the weights of competitive advantages, thereby accomplishing the overall goal of this study, to identify those advantages that would allow a greater focus on the customer.

Methods

Qualitative stage: Interviews

Thirteen practicing U.S. architects were interviewed. The size of the company and the city where the architect worked were important criteria used when selecting the respondents. Interviewing people from different company and city sizes incorporates the different environments and projects that architects face.

Each interview included two parts. First, we were interested in identifying a classification of wood products consistent with the way architects specify wood materials. Therefore, a preliminary classification scheme was created based on personal knowledge and a literature review. The interviews verified the adequacy of the preliminary classification: 1) a structural group, where strength and structural properties are the main requirements; 2) an appearance group, where aesthetics is the main requirement; and 3) an engineered wood products group, where both strength properties and appearance issues are important. Architects unanimously supported this subdivision as one that matches the way they select construction materials. Table 1 defines the groups in more detail.

The second part of the interview was an open question asking architects about the design attributes of wood products. They were also asked about what can increase the appeal of wood so that it will be preferred over competing materials, like steel, concrete, or plastics. Respondents answered the same question for each of the three product groups. We chose to retain attributes named by at least four people for use in the quantitative stage of the study. Architects used a very similar language for expressing the design concepts they consider, which made the attribute categorization and identification fairly easy. The actual attributes identified from the interviews are shown in the first column of Table 2.

The interviews identified that architects are deeply interested in environmentally friendly materials. They generally used the term "environmentally sustainable," a term that we also adopted in the paper, and that we will discuss later.

Quantitative stage: Mail questionnaire

A carefully constructed mail questionnaire was developed to assess the relative importance of the attributes identified in the qualitative stage. The questionnaire also included questions for measuring the effectiveness of actions of wood products companies targeting the improvement of their environmental image. For the rest of this article, those actions will be simply referred to as environmental actions.

The study pursued the opinion of a nationally representative sample of the owners or chief architects in architecture firms. The questionnaire underwent four rounds of pretests, with six different people who reviewed the material, in order to prevent possible measurement errors (Dillman 2000). We sent 1200 questionnaires, expecting a response rate of about 30 percent, and still meeting the target of about 380 responses, for a sampling error of 5 percent (Dillman 2000).

The mailing procedure was an adaptation of the Tailored Design Method (Dillman 2000). We received 375 valid responses. Taking into account non-deliverables, the response rate was 34 percent, which compares well with other studies that involved architects (Kozak and Cohen 1999, Damery and Fisette 2001). It is common practice to assume that late respondents (second mailing) are more similar to non-respondents than early respondents (first mailing) (Armstrong and Overton 1977). Early respondents were compared to late respondents on a total of 30 attributes. We found only one statistically significant difference (two-sided p-value < 0.05). One significant p-value out of 30 can happen just by chance, so there is no evidence of non-response error. The quality level of the sample can be assessed when analyzing potential sources of coverage error (Dillman 2000):

1. Database size: The mailing list was a random sample of architecture firms from a database maintained by Dunn and Bradstreet. This database is the largest in the nation with more than 115,000 companies.

2. University representation: Having respondents that are graduates of only a few universities may bias answers, due to the distinctive values and culture of each university. Respondents in this study pursued their undergraduate and/or graduate studies in a total of 108 universities (a mean of only 3 architects per university). Additionally, the alumni of the 5 universities found most frequently in the sample added to only 58 out of the 375 respondents, which provides further evidence that U.S. universities are well represented.

3. State representation: Another coverage error may happen if people from only a few states answer the questionnaire, resulting in the potential for local characteristics biasing answers. Respondents in this study worked in 48 states, with only Alaska and North Dakota missing.

Analysis

Table 2 provides the material design attributes of the three product groups considered. Architects were asked to assign a value for each attribute, according to the level of importance that the feature has in their material specification process. We used a Likert-type response scale, ranging from less important (1) to more important (7). The table displays the attribute names and their mean and standard deviation in the three left columns. The fourth column depicts a categorization system discussed in the next section. It is important to clarify the meaning of some attributes. Adaptability refers to how easily wood elements can be trimmed. Feasibility of curves refers to either the possibility of installing the wood material over a curved surface or building curved wood elements, like curved laminated beams. Finally, off-gassing refers to the concern about harmful vapors coming out of a material when in use.

HSD categorization method

It was of interest to determine if there were statistically significant differences regarding the importance of the attributes inside each product group. The problem is identical to the allocation of attributes to clusters, in which there is no statistically significant difference among the attributes inside any cluster. We considered each of the attributes as an independent sample and therefore the analysis corresponded to multiple comparisons of means (Ramsey and Schafer 1997). A large number of pairwise comparisons compounds statistical uncertainty. We used the Tukey HSD (honest significant difference) method to counteract this problem, which considers a familywise confidence level (Ramsey and Schafer 1997). Two means, [y.sub.i][y.sub.j], are declared not equal if ([y.sub.i] - [y.sub.j]) > HSD; HSD = multiplier * standard error, the multiplier is q([alpha], number of groups, degrees of freedom), a statistic that can be obtained from a Studentized Range Distribution (Kuehl 2000). We set significance at 1 percent due to the large sample size ([alpha] = 0.01). In the case of the structural product group, the 1 percent significance corresponded to an HSD of 0.5. The group of means in which we found no statistically significant differences was the set with a maximum of 5.5 (dimensionally stable) and a minimum of 5 (low cost). Two other groups of means were found. We named the groups as high importance or "a" (averages greater than 5.5), medium importance or "b" (averages between 5 and 5.5), and low importance or "c" (averages below 5). Any number of clusters can be defined using this method. The analysis demonstrated that three clusters were adequate for both the structural and the engineered wood products group, whereas only two clusters were appropriate for the appearance group. This categorization proved adequate for a subsequent QFD application (Cohen 1995).

Results

The purpose of this article is to analyze the environmental concerns and related characteristics of U.S. architects. Another article, to be published soon, will elaborate on the whole set of attributes identified by architects. Still, the conclusions and managerial implications draw attention to some issues beyond the environmental context.

The survey was successful in reaching the owner or chief architect of architecture firms: only 40 out of the 375 respondents (10.6%) were non-owners. Regarding other demographic characteristics, just over 30 percent (30.4%) of the chief architects or owners of architecture firms are younger than 46 years old, almost the same proportion as professionals 57 or older (30.7%). Finally, there are less than five employees in 60 percent of the responding architecture firms.

During the qualitative interviews, architects named environmentally sustainable (Sustainability: "a state or process that can be maintained indefinitely", IIDA 1999, p.2) as a very important attribute that they consider in all product groups. When probed more deeply, architects showed differences in their understanding of the concept of environmental sustainability. Our mail questionnaire specifically addressed this issue, by first asking about the importance of environmentally sustainable as a self-defined concept. A second section of the questionnaire investigated the real meaning of this concept for architects.

We were surprised to find that environmentally sustainable as a self-defined concept is only a medium-importance attribute ("b" category), although this attribute appeared very clearly during the qualitative interviews. Environmentally sustainable is one of the three least important attributes in both the structural and appearance groups, but is in a better position in the engineered wood products group. This makes sense because these products were introduced as environmentally friendly, since they can be manufactured with wood coming from fast-growing plantations, underutilized species, or smaller, second-growth trees, and have been promoted as utilizing less fiber than solid wood products.

We also hypothesized that younger architects would be "greener" than older ones (in other words, we hypothesized that the attribute environmentally sustainable would be rated higher by younger architects). The difference between people older and younger than 46 years old is not statistically significant (two-sided p-value of 0.23).

The attribute environmentally sustainable from the structural products group was analyzed separately in four regions of the United States. There is suggestive evidence of a statistically significant difference (one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA): p-value of 0.065). The West region (Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, and California) was the highest with an average of 5.3 (on a scale of 1 to 7) and the average for other regions was 5.0, 5.0, and 4.6. If the West is taken out of the analysis, the other three regions were not significantly different from one another (p-value of 0.25).

The lower relative importance of environmentally sustainable with respect to other attributes suggests that U.S. architects are currently more concerned about other aspects of wood materials, essentially technical issues, than about sustainability.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Figure 2 shows the perceptions of architects regarding three different environmental actions that wood products companies can perform. Specifically, for each product group, architects were asked to indicate, with a 1 to 7 scale, which feature about a company or the products of a firm would make the environmentally sustainable claim of the company more believable. It is important to comment that although environmentally sustainable was a self-defined attribute in the questionnaire, the perceptions of architects regarding the following three environmental actions allows inference regarding what environmentally sustainable really means for this group of professionals.

The three possible actions and the definitions given to architects were:

1. Third-party certified wood products: Wood materials that a third party (independent) certifies as being grown and harvested in an environmentally friendly manner.

2. Lumber coming from plantations instead of natural forests: This environmental action was used in the case of the structural group and the engineered wood products group. In the case of the appearance group, the action was changed to U.S. or Canadian hardwood lumber instead of tropical lumber, to reflect the likely use of hardwood lumber or veneer in furniture and exposed applications.

3. Reputation of the company: The company, through communication campaigns, shows itself as a serious firm committed to environmentally friendly practices.

We further hypothesized that action number 3 would receive a very low rating, consistent with statements from authors like Ottman (1998) who claims, "... the American public believes just about any societal group--not-for profits, the EPA, local government officials, even the press--before business large or small. Third parties help bolster industry's weak credibility." A quick look at Figure 2 shows that although third-party certified wood products is regarded as most important by architects (with a mean value of 5.4, regardless of the product group), the use of lumber coming from plantations instead of natural forests and environmental advertising campaigns (reputation of the company) have levels of importance that are not much less (mean values of 4.9 and 4.8, respectively). If separate one-way ANOVAs are run for the structural, appearance, and engineered wood product groups, third-party certified wood products proves to be significantly different from the other two categories, regardless of the product group. There is no significant difference between the two other categories (two-sided p-value from t-test: between 0.21 and 0.43 for the different product groups). It is important to emphasize that the high similarity of the standard deviations of the different environmental actions (between 1.5 and 1.7) is a crucial assumption behind the use of ANOVAs (Ramsey and Schafer 1997), and therefore the means can be said to be different. In summary, the action third-party certified wood products is at one higher level of importance than lumber coming from plantations instead of natural forests (U.S. or Canadian hardwood lumber instead of tropical lumber in the case of the appearance group), and communication campaigns (reputation of the company).

Limitations

The data analysis revealed an important source of error regarding the order in which the attributes inside each product group were presented to respondents. Dillman (2000) reports that other authors have asserted that people analyze all the categories before answering a question in a questionnaire. Therefore, the order of the attributes should not be an issue. He also notes that results from other studies contradict these findings. Before conducting the survey, we expected that both environmentally sustainable and low cost would be highly rated. Therefore, half of the questionnaires sent out had environmentally sustainable and low cost in the first and second position and the other half had them in the last and second-to-last position. While no statistically significant difference was found with low cost, a persistent significant difference in the mean importance of environmentally sustainable was found in each of the three product groups. In fact, this attribute received a lower weight when placed at the beginning than when placed at the end of the set of attributes, regardless of the product group (two-sided p-values of 0.02, 0.02 and 0.004) (Both the weight of environmentally sustainable when placed at the beginning and when placed at the end are shown in Table 2. The average is shown in parentheses). This variability means environmentally sustainable may fit in either the "b" or "c" category of the structural group. The other groups show stable attribute memberships. This result will be kept for posterior stages of the study in order to estimate if it impacts the overall conclusions. We suggest this outcome means that most people did not read all parts of a question before answering. Environmentally sustainable receives a higher rating when placed at the end because people have already assessed the other more technically oriented attributes. When in the first position, the respondent does not have a frame of reference for measuring the importance of environmentally sustainable. We do not expect other attributes to have this kind of problem because all other attributes are of a technical nature. Environmentally sustainable is a social context attribute and therefore we theorize that its importance increases after taking into account all other technical issues. Low cost, a practical attribute, supports this hypothesis because it was rated similarly regardless of its position in the questionnaire.

Conclusions and managerial implications

There are several conclusions and managerial implications from this research effort. First, unlike previous studies, we specifically measured the importance of environmental issues among architects and related that to other technical issues considered by architects. This feature of our study allows inference about specific actions that wood products companies can undertake to make wood products substitution less likely. Also important, we asked about specific environmental actions that wood products companies can undertake, allowing inference regarding what environmentally sustainable specifically means for architects

The attribute environmentally sustainable receives a medium-level importance ("b") in all product groups. Interestingly, its importance increases when architects are forced to consider other attributes at the same time, as was discussed in the Limitations section. This issue and the high importance obtained by quality or appearance attributes form the basis of our main recommendation regarding the content of environmental ads targeted to architects: to address a dual issue in the advertising, both a quality or appearance feature and an environmental one. Importantly, the quality or appearance issue changes depending on the product group. Table 3 gives specific recommendations for the content of environmental ads. Suggestions for headlines are also given, because it has been stated that headlines are the most important part of an advertisement (Hitchon 1991)

The quality or appearance attributes named in the examples in Table 3 received some of the highest levels of importance in the survey and they have interesting managerial implications of their own. One case is uniform quality, a top two attribute in both the structural and the engineered wood product groups (Table 2). Architects complained during the qualitative interviews about a general decrease in the quality of wood products, which is consistent with the findings of Hansen and Bush (1996), Weinfurter and Hansen (1999), and Eastin et al. (2001). Another case concerns two attributes rated as most important in the appearance group: Appearance, warmth, and tactile sensation of the material, and honest material. It is important to explain the meaning of these attributes. Architects expressed in the interviews that the grain and texture of wood are unique, thus appearance does not explain the concept adequately. Instead, appearance, warmth, and tactile sensation gives a holistic approach to the concept. Honest material simply means that architects like that a material is what it appears to be. This result suggests that it does not matter how well a plastic material imitates the wood grain, architects will still demand that if the material seems to be wood it must be wood!

As a general conclusion, environmental issues must be part of the technical and marketing efforts of wood products companies, but they are only one of several other quality and appearance features that architects consider when specifying materials for a construction project. Therefore, wood products companies have a two-fold challenge ahead of them: 1) improve quality, appearance, and environmental aspects of their materials; and 2) effectively communicate those aspects to their customers. If firms do not succeed in this challenge, the ever-increasing pool of alternative products available to architects may continue to take market share from wood products.

Table 1.--Wood product groups.

     Product groups        Product properties that are
                             important for each group

Structural products group    Strength and structural
                              properties

Appearance products group    Aesthetic properties

Engineered wood products     Strength and aesthetic
 group                       properties

     Product groups         Specific products that fit into
                                      the groups

Structural products group    Softwood lumber + softwood
 plywood + OSB

Appearance products group    Hardwood decorative panels +
                              moldings + finishing materials

Engineered wood products     Glulam, I-joists, etc.
 group

Table 2.--Key design attributes used by architects when specifying wood
materials.

                                     Mean         SD (a)  HSD method

U.S. structural products
 Material available                   5.8          0.9        a
 Uniform quality                      5.6          1.3        a
 Dimensionally stable                 5.5          1.3        b
 Adaptability                         5.5          1.2        b
 Durability                           5.2          1.4        b
 Knowledgeable work force             5.1          1.4        b
 Environmentally sustainable   4.8 and 5.2 (5.0)   1.5        b
 Low cost                             5.0          1.3        b
 Fire concern                         4.2          1.6        c

U.S. appearance products
 Appearance, warmth, tactile          5.8          1.0        a
 Honest material                      5.4          1.4        a
 Offgassing                           4.9          1.6        b
 Environmentally sustainable   4.7 and 5.1 (4.9)   1.6        b
 Durability                           4.8          1.6        b
 Low cost                             4.5          1.4        b

U.S. engineered wood products
 Uniform quality                      6.1          0.9        a
 Dimensionally stable                 6.0          0.9        a
 Strong material                      5.9          1.0        a
 Adaptability                         5.4          1.2        a
 Environmentally sustainable   4.8 and 5.3 (5.0)   1.5        b
 Feasibility of curves                4.8          1.5        b
 Low cost                             4.8          1.3        b
 Offgassing                           4.4          1.7        c
 Appearance, warmth, tactile          4.2          1.7        c

(a) SD = standard deviation.

Engineered Wood Products

Reputation of the company                      4.8
Plantation forests instead of natural forests  4.9
Third-party certified wood products            5.4

Appearance Group

Reputation of the company                      4.8
US or Canadian instead of tropical             4.9
Third-part certified wood products             5.4

Structural Group

Reputation of the company                      4.8
Plantation forests instead of natural forests  4.9
Third-party certified wood products            5.4

Figure 2.--Perceptions of architects regarding three different
environmental actions that wood products companies can perform (showing
mean and standard deviation).

Note: Table made from bar graph.

Table 3.--Some suggestions for the content of environmental ads
targeting architects.

   Product groups               Content recommendations

Structural products    Headline:             Use of plantation lumber
group

                       Quality issue:        Uniform quality of the
                                              material of availability

                       Environmental issue:  Third-party certification

Appearance products    Headline:             Use of U.S. or Canadian
group                                         lumber instead of
                                              tropical lumber

                       Appearance issue:     It is real wood, with its
                                              appearence, warmth, and
                                              tactile characteristics

                       Environmental issue:  Third-party certification

Engineered wood        Headline:             Use of plantation lumber
products group

                       Quality issue:        Uniform quality of the
                                              material or dimensional
                                              stability

                       Environmental issue:  Third-party certification

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Ernesto R. Wagner *

Eric N. Hansen *

The authors are, respectively, PhD Candidate and Associate Professor, Dept. of Wood Science and Engineering, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis, OR 97331. This is paper 3561, Forest Research Lab., Oregon State Univ. The authors would like to acknowledge the comments and insights of Roy C. Anderson, PhD Candidate, and Tom McLain, Dept. Head, Wood Science and Engineering, Oregon State Univ. This paper was received for publication in June 2002. Article No. 9502.

* Forest Products Society Member.

[c]Forest Products Society 2004.

Forest Prod. J. 54(1): 19-25.