The Green-Wood Company a trading division of Specialist Joinery (South) Ltd has been set up to meet the growing and important sustainability agenda of many of our clients. We are working with a number of our suppliers to ensure that the materials we use are obtained from sustainable and managed sources.
One such area is the use of locally grown Sweet Chestnut. Since Roman times the Sweet Chestnut has been grown in large volumes in Southern England using the coppicing system which retains the tree ‘butt' for future ‘harvesting' in years to come.
It is then laminated and finger jointed using modern computer controlled machinery, techniques and adhesives to produce extremely stable and very durable long lasting joinery sections for windows, doors and other joinery items.
There are currently around 18,000ha of sweet chestnut woods in Southern England which until recently had been used mainly for fencing & hop poles.
These markets have declined in recent years but with the technological advances in adhesives and machinery it is now possible to use this species, dried, laminated and finger jointed to larger sections for joinery production.
Only a small proportion of the annual increment growth is taken from the woods and with coppicing, the tree regrows from the same rootstock and is not 'killed' thus maintaining a highly sustainable historic silvicultural system.
