Carbon Capturing Potential of Wood Substitution in Domestic and Office Furniture in India

The changes in temperature have been attributed to increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other green house gases in the atmosphere and major concerned at present. Greenhouse gases naturally act as a blanket “known as Greenhouse Effect” of the Earth and facilitate for maintaining about 33 degrees Celsius temperature. Over the past century, the Earth‟s temperature has increased by about 0.50 degrees Celsius. The carbon concentration in the atmosphere may be reduced by two approaches. Keeping the atmospheric CO2 concentration below 450–600 ppmv poses an unprecedented challenge to humanity and can be attained by two main approaches: (1) to reduce emissions; (2) to capture CO2 and store it, i.e., through sequestration. Carbon sequestration involves two steps: (1) CO2 capture from the atmosphere (2) storage. The present study deals with the second approach storage. The study concludes that in India the requirement of raw materials such as wood, metal and plastic for furniture annually was 11.6 Mm 3 , 4.46 Mm3, 1.78 Mm3 respectively. Based on the analogy as defined in the methodology, the replacement of 1 M 3 metal or plastic by wood would save 2 tons of carbon dioxide emission. Therefore, this results of the saving of 624000 tonnes CO2 emission against 5% of replacement of each matal and plastic as furniture raw material by wood. This study advocate, use of wood as raw material for furniture, which have a significant potential for mitigating the climate change impacts.