Category Archives: Wood, Paper & Green Building

GALWAY, IRELAND — Construction and buildings are responsible for about 39 per cent of all global carbon emissions with about 28 per cent being attributed to operational costs of the building and 11 per cent attributed to the embodied carbon of the construction materials and processes. Reducing the impact of construction is essential. …Recent policy updates will ensure that all new buildings in the EU will have significantly lower operation impacts. …This has resulted in significant innovation within the construction industry in areas such as product development, lean construction processes and so on. Timber is a climate-friendly material that has seen a revival within the construction sector in recent years. …The Timber Engineering Research Group at NUI Galway have been exploring the possibilities of manufacturing glulam and CLT from Irish grown timber and its potential use in construction.

Concerns have been raised over the cladding at a student accommodation building in Bolton where a fire spread “extremely rapidly”, gutting the upper floor. An investigation is under way… and calls are growing for an overhaul of UK fire safety regulations. Grenfell United, the group of survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, called for the declaration of a national emergency over the lack of action. …Witnesses said … a small fire ripped through the upper part of the six-storey building, which is cladded in high-pressure laminate (HPL) material, “within minutes”. The government’s response to the cladding scandal has largely been confined to aluminium composite material (ACM) panels, but there could be thousands of blocks with HPL. …HPL panels, which can be made of compressed paper or wood fibre, have a variety of combustibility ratings, while combustible ACM panels were banned last year for use on new tall residential and public buildings following post-Grenfell investigations.

Amsterdam-based design firm Waterstudio is already well-known for its incredible floating architecture, but it continues to break ground in the world of innovative design. Now, the firm, which is led by Koen Olthuis, has unveiled the world’s first floating timber tower. Slated for the waters of Rotterdam, the tower is made out of CLT and will house office space, a public green park and a restaurant with a terrace. …The 130-foot-tall tower will be made out of cross-laminated timber, making the structure much lighter than concrete builds. Additionally, working with CLT means the building will be made with a renewable resource, providing the city of Rotterdam with a cutting-edge sustainable landmark. 

Madrid airport bamboo

Modified natural materials will be an essential component of a sustainable future, but first, a detailed understanding of their properties is needed. The way heat flows across bamboo cell walls has been mapped using advanced scanning thermal microscopy, providing a new understanding of how variations in thermal conductivity are linked to the bamboo’s elegant structure. The findings…will guide the development of more energy-efficient and fire-safe buildings, made from natural materials, in the future. …Renewable, plant-based materials such as bamboo have huge potential for sustainable and energy-efficient buildings. …A better understanding of the thermal properties of bamboo provides insights into how to reduce the energy consumption of bamboo buildings. It also enables modelling of the way bamboo building components behave when exposed to fire, so that measures can be incorporated to make bamboo buildings safer.

LAVA (Laboratory for Visionary Architecture) has teamed up with urban agricultural collective Cityplot to design LIFE Hamburg, a new energy self-sufficient educational campus that will “reinvent learning” for 1,600 students. Created in the shape of an infinity loop, the nature-inspired learning landscape encapsulates the educational paradigms of Learnlife (purpose-inspired and personal learning) as well as the spatial typology concepts of American futurist David Thornburg. Slated to open 2023, the solar-powered sustainable building will feature a carbon dioxide-absorbing green facade and an organic rooftop garden. …For energy efficiency, the architects have designed the three-story building with a load-bearing wood structure and a highly insulated glazed shell that will bring natural light inside. The accessible roof will be partly covered with enough solar panels to meet all of the building’s energy needs as well as outdoor learning spaces and edible gardens.

University and Scion research shows how New Zealand can achieve “zero carbon” in our third-biggest area of emissions, buildings. …Buildings cause GHG emissions in two ways; the embodied carbon from the extraction, manufacture and transport of the materials used, and the ongoing emissions from the energy used by the building. Nearly all electricity in New Zealand is from renewable sources so measurement of ongoing energy use, known as “Life Cycle Analysis”, is fairly irrelevant in terms of climate change. Don’t get me wrong, it’s always good to save power for economic reasons, but right now the biggest show in town is climate change. So when it comes to buildings and climate change, it is only the upfront embodied carbon in the materials that is relevant in New Zealand. Hands down the products that cause the most climate change damage are concrete and steel. 

NETHERLANDS — A timber pavilion called Biobasecamp at Dutch Design Week brought together projects that demonstrate the potential of the “concrete of the future” to fight against climate change. Studio Marco Vermeulen built the wooden pavilion as a covered exhibition-space for a series of displays highlighting how timber can be used in bio-based architecture projects. Called Biobasecamp, the pavilion was erected in Ketelhuisplein in the Strijp-S district of Eindhoven for the duration of Dutch Design Week. The roof of the pavilion was the shape of a five-pronged star with squared corners. It was built by timber construction specialists Derix from 200 metres-cubed of lightweight, modular 16 by 3.5 metre cross-laminated timber boards.

A report launched by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for the Timber Industries, reveals the importance timber industries could have on the UK’s housebuilding targets, whilst also helping the country achieve its net zero carbon emissions by 2050. The report titled ‘How the timber industries can help solve the housing crisis’, argues that using timber in construction is key to meeting emissions targets, and urges Government to implement the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee (CCC) by increasing the use of timber in construction. A long-term spending pledge, reformation of the right-to-buy scheme and building regulations that encourage innovation in construction are amongst the recommendations to the government. Timber frames are built using offsite construction methods, and are quicker, cheaper, quieter and more environmentally friendly than traditional construction methods.

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Aalto University have developed a wood-based cellulose fiber yarn that is an affordable solution for capturing pharmaceutical substances—especially ethinylestradiol in contraceptive pills—that would otherwise end up in bodies of water. By attaching a cyclic sugar onto the surface of the cellulose fiber yarn, the research scientists were able to create a material that efficiently captures ethinylestradiol (EE2), a hormone used in contraceptive pills. …”Hormone capture would be most effective in wastewater treatment plants and hospitals, since the wastewater in these facilities contains a higher concentration of the compounds. We are developing a wood-based affordable material that could be thrown into a tank in a wastewater treatment plant or used as a filter in a pipe connected to the tank.

Forest-rich Norway is a leader in building with lower-carbon structural wood. But it still lacks factories that can turn trees into building parts. The Norwegian town of Brumunddal… is known for something even more grandiose: The world’s tallest timber structure. …Mjøstårnet is a statement to the world that timber construction has arrived, and Norway is ready to build. There’s just one thing: The country has yet to seize the means of its own timber production. “Norway is a banana republic when it comes to this,” Jørgen Tycho, an architect with the firm Oslotre. …Today, a handful of companies are trying again. Long-standing Norwegian timber-supply company Splitkon, which previously relied on Swedish and Austrian suppliers for its CLT, opened its own domestic production facility in early 2019. …Now newcomers such as Tewo are lining up for a slice of the pie.