Category Archives: Wood, Paper & Green Building

Gia Lai, Vietnam – The Central Highlands province of Gia Lai, once known as the “timber industry tycoon”, is devising a clear strategy to put its wood processing industry on solid footing when it comes to exports to the European Union (EU). Gia Lai is now home to nearly 300 wood production and processing facilities, mostly small-scale operations that engage in timber logging and processing to supply raw materials and wood chips to processors and exporters outside the province. With a forested area of over 150,000ha and approximately 90,000ha of rubber plantations, the province is considered a significant source of raw materials for wood producers and processors. The province is working to create a legal framework to ensure the legality of Vietnamese timber exports to the European market under the Voluntary Partnership Agreement on Forest Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade.

Timber Development UK is stepping up to eliminate misconceptions about timber buildings in Timber Typologies – a groundbreaking new book produced with Waugh Thistleton Architects. Timber Typologies aims to clear up the confusion which persists around timber building systems and their appropriate applications. It brings clarity and consistency to the variety of timber systems and options which exists for policy makers and built environment specialists alike. You can download download Timber Typologies for free for free from the Timber Development UK website. It is intended as a primer – a ‘beginner’s guide’ – for all the different timber solutions. This book will help build understanding for developers, policy makers, designers and stakeholders to make the right decisions and deliver the best buildings possible using timber.

SINGAPORE — Singapore has long billed itself as a “garden city.”…The island has embarked on extensive tree-planting programs and embraced so-called “biophilic” architecture. A new six-story college campus building stands as Singapore’s latest ode to nature. Home to Nanyang Technological University’s (NTU) business school. …Everything from handrails to benches, door frames to room dividers were built using wood. So, too, were the structural beams and columns. In fact, the building is made almost entirely from mass timber. Sprawling across 43,500 square meters (468,000 square feet), it is now Asia’s largest timber building, by floor area. …Recent years have heralded a huge increase in the number of large-scale wooden structures being built around the world. …Asian cities have often been slower to embrace the trend than European and North American ones. Singapore’s building codes only allowed timber architecture to rise to 24 meters, though this height restriction has since been lifted.

The University of Wales Trinity Saint David’s Construction Wales Innovation Centre is hosting the WoodBuild Conference and Expo 2023 on July 12 and 13 to focus on the key role of forestry and timber construction in addressing the climate crisis. The aim of the two-day event organised by Woodknowledge Wales, is to inspire, create new business opportunities, offer a collaborative platform for all participants and to share information on current and future Welsh Government policies. …Decarbonisation and green recovery are at the core of the Welsh Government’s Well-being of Future Generations Act (2015). As our only widely available renewable construction material, timber plays an important role in developing new low-carbon approaches to construction. …In partnership with Woodknowledge Wales, the University was rewarded funding … to deliver a feasibility study and business plan with the ambition to establish a Welsh Timber Development Centre, which includes plans for the first timber focussed facility in Wales.

This week in Paris, negotiators from around the world are convening for a United Nations meeting …to find a globally binding solution for plastic pollution. …Governments and industry are introducing rules and incentives to help businesses stop using single-use plastics while also encouraging collection and recycling. …In Australia, plastic is largely “downcycled”, which means it is recycled into lower quality plastics. This can seem like an attractive way to deal with waste-plastic stockpiles… but downcycling risks doing more harm than good: 1. Replacing wood with recycled plastics risks contaminating our wildest natural spaces; 2. Taking circular plastics from their closed loop to meet recycled-content targets creates more waste; and 3. Using “compostable” plastics in non-compostable conditions creates still more plastic pollution. At the right temperature with the right amount of moisture, compostable plastics breakdown into soil. But if the conditions are not “just right”, they won’t break down at all.

Photo: Paul Wyeth

Why would a naval architect and structural engineer used to working with cutting edge materials for America’s Cup teams be excited about working with wood? “It’s quite simple for me,” says French designer Thomas Tison, “Modernity does not neglect where we all come from – on the contrary it makes the best of it. In a way a boat is a heritage, so to ignore wood would be to ignore the essence of yacht design and building. …The enthusiasm naval architects young and old have for wood/epoxy composite construction is striking. Many of today’s stand-out new designs on both sides of the Atlantic are built this way and it’s often the best option for one off builds and short production runs. Key advantages include stunning aesthetics, stiff, lightweight structures and excellent longevity. …These boats will also be more sustainable than their contemporaries built using glass fibre or composites.

If time travel was possible, medieval carpenters would surely be amazed to see how woodworking techniques they pioneered while building Notre Dame Cathedral more than 800 years ago are being used again today to rebuild the world-famous monument’s fire-ravaged roof. Certainly the reverse is true for the modern-day carpenters using medieval-era skills. Working with hand axes to fashion hundreds of tonnes of oak beams for the framework of Notre Dame’s new roof has, for them, been like rewinding time. It’s given them a new appreciation of their predecessors’ handiwork that pushed the architectural envelope back in the 13th century. “It’s a little mind-bending sometimes,” one of the carpenters, Peter Henrikson, said. He said there were times when he was whacking a mallet on a chisel that he found himself thinking about his medieval counterparts who were cutting “basically the same joint 900 years ago”. …Some 1,200 trees have been felled for the work.

When it comes to sustainability and circularity, wood as a natural raw material has several advantages over other building materials. As a bio-based resource, it has considerable benefits concerning greenhouse gas emissions, carbon-storing, thermal insulation as well as human health and well-being compared to other construction materials. New types of wood products, being the result of extensive research, enable the extensive use of wood in tall buildings. At the same time, innovative wood products provide less manufacturing waste, low carbon-emission alternatives and store massive quantities of carbon while new technologies speed construction processes, promote energy efficiency and minimize waste. This study examines the benefits of wood as a construction material and discusses practices applied in the wood construction sector from the perspective of circularity, sustainability and climate change mitigation.