Residential Siding Options

Decisions about siding are consistently among the most difficult for environmentally concerned designers and builders of residential and light commercial buildings. Siding products must withstand all types of weather, look attractive both from a distance and up close, and be affordable to buy and install. With these demands in mind, which are the best products from an environmental standpoint? How do you balance the resource depletion concerns of using old-growth cedar with the life-cycle pollution concerns of PVC and the maintenance and durability concerns with the many available alternatives?

This article won’t offer all of the answers, but it will help you sort out the various pros and cons of siding options relative to the environment. Included in the discussion are wood sidings (cedar, redwood, spruce, and other softwoods), hardboard sidings, oriented-strand board (OSB) sidings, vinyl (PVC) sidings, aluminum siding, stucco, and fiber-cement sidings. Not addressed here are masonry sidings, including brick and face stone.

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