Category Archives: Wood, Paper & Green Building

Organisers of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics unveiled a custom-built $188 million gymnastics venue inspired by Japanese architecture that uses wood brought from around the country. The futuristic-looking Ariake Gymnastics Centre uses 2,300 cubic metres of wood and is intended to hark back to traditional building techniques that predated the use of modern materials. The structure features a gently undulating roof, with external walls constructed from lengths of cedar wood. …The building, one of a handful custom-built for the Games, “symbolises Japan’s wood culture and viewers can feel its simple beauty”, the organisers said. “We’re using a lot of wood,” venue general manager Koichi Fukui told reporters. “We can smell wood and feel the warmth of wood,” he said. Built at a cost of 20.5 billion yen, the venue features a domed ceiling constructed from Japanese larch with no steel framework and is among the largest of its kind in the world.

Japan’s Ministry of the Environment has created an unprecedented supercar made entirely of wood. The entire car is composed of nano cellulose fibers, or plant-derived material (including agricultural waste) that’s one-fifth of the weight of—and five times as strong as—steel, the Ministry of the Environment notes. By using those fibers to compose most of the bodywork and part of the tub, the result is a car about half as light as your traditional one, with a ten percent overall reduction in mass. …There isn’t really any information at all out there about what kind of power source will be implemented, but the rumor is that it’ll be equipped with a hydrogen fuel cell and have a top speed of… 12 mph. So, yes, there’s some room for improvement in the powertrain.

VÄXJÖ, Sweden — “Only a negligible proportion of the global production of clothing and textiles is recycled today. Virtually everything is sent to landfill or incineration. But Swedish innovation …can now influence the game at a global level,” said Lars Idermark, President and CEO of Södra. One of the major obstacles to textile recycling is that the fabrics are often made from blended materials. Södra’s new technique can separate the cotton and polyester in polycotton blends… The pure cotton fibres are then added to our wood-derived textile pulp, which can then be used to make new textiles. “We are now …offering circular flows of textile fibres. A sweater can now become a sweater again. This will create added value for our customers, and especially the fashion industry. It’s a big day for us and an equally big day for the emerging circular bioeconomy,” said Johannes Bogren, President of Södra Cell Bioproducts. 

Italian architect Stefano Boeri has unveiled plans to create a forested smart city in Cancun, Mexico, that is designed to be a “pioneer” of more eco-efficient developments. Smart Forest City Cancun is intended to be built on a 557 hectare site near the Mexican city. According to the architect it will contain 7.5 million plants, including numerous species of trees, shrubs and bushes. “Smart Forest City Cancun is a Botanical Garden, within a contemporary city, based on Mayan heritage and in its relationship with the natural and sacred world,” said Stefano Boeri Architetti. “An urban ecosystem where nature and city are intertwined and act as one organism.” The project forms of part of Boeri’s Forest City concept – which will see cities made up of plant-covered skyscrapers rolled out across China’s urban areas – and the abundance of greenery is intended to depollute the surrounding environment. 

Marco Vermeulen

The Netherlands could build a million new homes from sustainably harvested local wood and save 100 megatons of carbon in the process, according to architect Marco Vermeulen. The Dutch architect has calculated that the country’s 140,000 hectares of harvestable woodlands could provide enough timber for 22,000 houses each year. This means the country’s entire shortfall of a million homes could be met within 45 years without using concrete or steel, which contribute to climate change. “Building a new house averagely needs 50 cubic-meters of wood,” said the architect… “You could grow 60 houses every day in those 140,000 hectares,” he said. “That means you can harvest every year 22,000 houses on Dutch soil. That means it would take about 45 years to build the whole million houses.” The timber would lock up 45 megatons of carbon dioxide but the total benefit would be 100 megatons, since building out of concrete and steel would lead to emissions of 55 megatons, he argued.

New research from the Cambridge University’s Department of Biochemistry aims to understand what makes wood strong so that we know how to make it even stronger. The team hopes that their findings can guide future forestry breeding programs towards producing stronger wood than ever before — and support the renewed interest wood is receiving as an alternative building material to steel and concrete. “It is the molecular architecture of wood that determines its strength, but until now we didn’t know the precise molecular arrangement of cylindrical structures called macrofibrils in the wood cells” says Dr Jan Lyczakowski, the paper’s first author from Cambridge University’s Department of Biochemistry. “This new technique has allowed us to see the composition of the macrofibrils, and how the molecular arrangement differs between plants, and it helps us understand how this might impact on wood density and strength.”

Forest enterprises, timber associations, governments and intergovernmental organizations from home and abroad have agreed to create a voluntary network to enhance cooperation on the legality and sustainability of all forestry operations, according to a forum that concluded in Shanghai on Wednesday. The two-day International Forum: Together towards Global Green Supply Chain was attended by some 400 professionals from the tropical timber industry and trade. They discussed topics like the contribution of productive forests and the wood industry to the mitigation of climate change and sustainable development, trends in global timber supply and the development of legality and sustainability in global wood supply chains. The Global Green Supply Chain network will be maintained by a coalition of forest companies and other wood industry stakeholders committed to legal and sustainable supply chains. Its members pledged to help build a collaborative network to promote the sustainable development of forest industries and contribute to the conservation of global forest resources.

A double-curved timber shell constructed from 7,700 timber pieces forms the Swatch Headquarters by Shigeru Ban in Biel, Switzerland. The watchmaker’s campus centres on a 240-metre-long timber vault – one of the largest wooden structures in Europe, claims the practice. …The 7,700 timber pieces forming the gridshell roof of the Swatch building were engineered with a precision of 0.1 millimetres. The architecture studio said the design is “playful, innovative and provocative” and demonstrates the capabilities of timber construction at a large scale. Inside, a triple-height atrium leads to three storeys of office space sitting within this wooden shell. The timber superstructure has been left exposed where it meets the edge of each floor plate and on the ceiling of the upper level.

We are in the early stages of building our next home and want it to be as sustainable as possible and built from timber. But we are concerned that timber is a fire hazard. There is a common misunderstanding that timber construction is more susceptible to fire than other building materials. The cause of most domestic fires is electrical faults or people, such as smoking or kitchen accidents — fires very rarely start in the structure. The fact is that all materials have some vulnerability to fire, for example, steel softens and concrete explodes. The key therefore is to protect the structure to ensure that the building retains its integrity to enable inhabitants to escape and allow time for fire fighters to deal with the blaze.