The Wood Protection Association and its members champion the use of building with timber – influencing, developing and promoting technologies that enhance its performance and value as a building resource for the future.

What is wood protection?

If you’re an architect, engineer, landscaper or contractor working with wood, you’ll know your choice of timber is vital to the look and cost of a project. However in terms of longevity and performance, it’s also important to consider specifying an industrial, factory applied pre-installation treatment – they fall into 3 categories:

Wood Modification

Why and when does timber need protection?

Both softwood and hardwood timbers have an amazing variety of natural properties that lend themselves well when used in building applications. Properties differ between species but timber products are generally thermally and acoustically insulating, easy to work, residually strong and lightweight to list a but a few. 

This of course is in addition to the fact that wood is recognised as being a 100% renewable resource – modern forestry standards ensure wood is harvested in a sustainable way so we need to make the most of this amazing natural resource. 

In order to meet today’s building standards and codes of practice and to enhance its performance in service, timber's natural ability sometimes needs additional help. We can categorise these situations simply into two areas:

Assured Quality from the WPA and its members

The WPA operate a series of industry recognised Quality Approval (QA) schemes branded as WPA Benchmark. These cover formulations, processes and products – providing valid independent assessment and verification.

In addition, our members can supply timber treatment formulations, process treatments and complete treated products – find them in the appropriate sections: