Category Archives: Wood, Paper & Green Building

Gulou in China’s Jiangmen City was built on tidal flats… In this area, land parts were often connected by wooden bridges. Now, it is being turned into an eco-cultural tourism resort by LUO Studio. …LUO Studio has designed this covered arch bridge out of wood, which was evidently common in the area. It explains: “Constructing a covered corridor on bridges is an old tradition dating back to the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. The initial intention was to strengthen the bridge structure, resist rain and moisture, keep the wood dry, and prevent it from corrosion. This project also inherits the construction wisdom of ancient covered bridges. The covered corridor enhances the overall structural stability and protects the arched wooden structure beneath from exposure to sun and rain.”

UK — Sustainalytics’ Justin Cheng details the growth of mass timber as a substitute construction material, and explains why concrete is here to not stay. …According to the International Energy Agency, nearly 40% of global carbon emissions originate from the construction process and operation of buildings. …As an innovation in the industry, mass timber construction emits significantly less carbon than traditional concrete and metal structures, while modular construction ensures usability across many building types. …We anticipate mass timber will grow in appeal to consumers and developers over the next several years. Drivers include further global building code changes that allow for taller wood construction projects, technological advances in material and engineering solutions to allow for more cost-effective and widespread adoption of mass timber, and increased investor and consumer awareness.

Switzerland is set to become home to the world’s tallest timber residential building. The project, named Rocket&Tigerli, will consist of four buildings including one that boasts a 100-meter-tall (328-foot) tower. The development will be built in the Swiss city of Winterthur, which is located near Zurich. The design will offer modern, high-quality housing with a maximum inflow of daylight, according to its designers, the Danish firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects (SHL). It will also seek to create an active neighborhood that will be “rooted in the area’s historical context,” according to a press release from the firm. …The project marks a milestone in the construction of timber buildings, said SHL. The firm added that, at 100 meters, it sets the record for residential buildings with a load-bearing timber construction, and “introduces an innovative construction system that examines wood as a natural replacement for concrete.”

One of Australia’s largest timber-producing regions will explore using low-value wood fibre in engineered products to address the nation’s growing structural timber deficit crisis.  The Green Triangle forestry industry, spanning parts of western Victoria and the Limestone Coast in South Australia, has received a $1.3 million federal grant to explore the creation of new wood products using softwood and hardwood pulp.  The project comes amid the ongoing export log ban by China and structural timber shortages faced by homebuilders, renovators and the construction sector. A report by Forest and Wood Products Australia claims demand for new housing will climb from 183,000 new dwellings per year to 259,000 by 2050.  This is expected to drive an increase of almost 50 per cent in the demand for sawn softwood.

Melbourne developer James Dibble is hoping to build the world’s tallest hybrid timber building in South Perth after submitting plans for a 183-metre apartment tower that would be three metres higher than Atlassian’s new Sydney headquarters.  Known as C6, the $350 million Elenberg Fraser-designed project at 6 Charles Street, near the Perth Zoo, will include about 7400 cubic metres of timber in its construction – 42 per cent of its total structure – plus steel, concrete and other materials.  If it is approved by the City of South Perth, C6 will be Australia’s second carbon-negative building after the Atlassian tower, meaning it will remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere rather than adding it. …“Timber as a building material has been around for centuries, but only recently has mass timber construction and fabrication methods made it a viable option en masse,” Mr Dibble said. [Access to this story may require a subscription to the source publication]

Singapore—A UK-Singapore joint venture is set to introduce engineered timber, or Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL), for housing projects in India and other South Asian countries in an ambitious bid to substitute wood for steel and concrete and help scale up low-carbon construction. A team of designers and engineers working with locally-sourced timber will be located in Chennai in the coming months, said Kevin Hill, Managing Director of timber design and construction company Venturer Pte Ltd, a partnership with Singapore’s Woh Hup Construction Group. …“The world is finally accepting that timber construction can be the single most important way to cut emissions for the built environment,” said Hill… He pointed out that “Wood for good” is no longer an idle wish. …Hill sees a huge market for timber housing in India, Nepal and Bhutan, backed by the availability of good grade timber, responsibly-sourced from the region and not imported from Europe.

The Danish architectural firm, Schmidt Hammer Lassen has designed a 100-meter-tall, or more than 30-story tall housing block in Switzerland that will be the world’s tallest cross-laminated timber building when it is completed. The projected second tallest is still under construction. The Rocket&Tigerli, a terracotta-clad building is set to be built on a former industrial site near Zurich. It will be comprised of four building sections of different heights rising to 100 meters tall making it the world’s tallest building with a load-bearing timber structure, according to UrbanMilwaukee.com. ….The concrete core has been replaced with wood, resulting in the individual beam coming in at a lower weight. This makes it possible to build taller constructions while, at the same time, ensuring that the entire building process achieves a lower amount of embedded carbon, the Zurich-based company said. 

…Since 2019, however, Brumunddal on the northeastern shore of Lake Mjøsa, in Norway has achieved a more welcome identity: as the site of Mjøstårnet, the tallest all-timber building in the world. Mjøstårnet—the name means “Tower of Mjøsa”—stands at two hundred and eighty feet and consists of eighteen floors… It depends for its strength and stability not on steel and concrete but on giant wooden beams of glulam—short for “glued laminated timber”—an engineered product in which pieces of lumber are bound together with water-resistant adhesives. …About eighteen thousand trees were required to produce the wood products used in the construction of Mjøstårnet and the adjoining pool. In aggregate, those trees sequester more than two thousand tons of carbon dioxide. (Norwegian law requires harvested acres to be replanted.) …Many municipalities and nations are embracing the environmental advantages of building with timber. 

A new initiative is offering free bellyboard hire across England, Wales and Northern Ireland to discourage the use of polluting plastic boards. Surf Wood for Good aims to tackle the waste caused by polystyrene bodyboards, which are usually imported and single-use, by lending beachgoers British-made wooden boards. The environmentally friendly alternatives will be available to borrow free of charge from stockists in 24 coastal sites until October, including in Bournemouth, Cornwall and Grimsby. It is estimated that more than 16,000 polystyrene bodyboards are left on UK beaches each year, according to environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy. …Environmental charity Surfers Against Sewage added: “Plastic pollution is a huge issue, with 8m pieces of plastic entering the ocean every single day. Not only is Surf Wood For Good kinder to our planet, it provides endless fun in the water, where you can use the board over and over again.”

Matthew LInegar

PBC Today spoke with Matthew Linegar, head of product management at Stora Enso, to discuss how the use of innovative, green building materials – such as cross laminated timber (CLT) and laminated veneer lumber (LVL) – are helping to reduce the environmental impact of construction.  According to a new report, failure to decarbonise newly constructed buildings could prevent the EU from achieving its climate targets for 2030 and 2050. As you know, the construction industry’s environmental impact is one of the worst, with many of our building materials reliant on the grid – using fossil fuels to manufacture. Of course, we are making progress with more momentum toward innovative, green building materials such as wood but more needs to be done to make this to be a priority for the industry over the next five years.  … Reduced construction time is one of the greatest incentives of timber in construction as this results in cost efficiencies.