Category Archives: Wood, Paper & Green Building

A small timber town in South Australia has edged out metropolitan Melbourne to win an innovative $60 million timber manufacturing plant and deliver 50 new jobs to the Green Triangle. Timber manufacturing company Timberlink Australia will produce both cross laminated timber (CLT) and glue laminated timber (GLT) for commercial building construction at its Tarpeena site. Executive general manager for sales, marketing and corporate affairs David Oliver said it was the first plant in Australia to produce both types of timber product. “It’ll really help to de-risk the demand for timber,” Mr Oliver said. “Home building today is very buoyant … this product is used, generally speaking, in high-rise construction, which tends to operate in a different economic cycle. “Glue laminated beams are essentially used to replace what would be a steel beam in the construction of a building … and then the CLT is essentially replacing concrete wall and floor panels.

Putting an absolutely new kind of spin on “Home Delivery”, Brette Haus’ prefabricated cabins are literally shipped to your location on the back of a trailer. In a matter of 3 hours, the home is placed on the site, unfolded, and secured in place, turning it from one weird wooden carton into a liveable cabin with anywhere between 22 to 47 sq.ft. of space. Each cabin takes roughly 8 weeks to fabricate and comes made entirely from carbon-neutral, weather-proof, and sustainable cross-laminated timber. There is no need for a permanent foundation… the cabins can easily be unfolded on any levelled ground before being secured in place using screw piles. The hinges on the cabin can survive up to 100 folding cycles (which means you can carry your house to multiple locations), and Brette Haus even offers optional addons like a waste-tank and solar panel kit, allowing you to live comfortably, yet off the grid… 

Etta Madete

Can the future of Africa’s cities be growing on trees? When I finished architecture school, I was excited to put into practice my training in sustainable architecture. But the reality of Nairobi, Kenya, was a wake up call. The over commercialisation of the industry directly contradicted the abject poverty, the two million housing deficit and ongoing natural disasters brought about by climate change, urbanisation and unemployment. This means our built environment is responsible for 39% of all global carbon emissions… Now many are looking to Africa’ s forest as a homegrown solution. …With commercial forestry, the incentive is not to replace agricultural produce but to grow trees alongside, as a long term investment. In Western Kenya for example, the profits from just ten, six-year-old trees could cover an entire term of a child ‘ s high school tuition . This will shift the economic stability of millions away from the hand -mouth economy in the sector.

It’s no secret that something drastic needs to be done with the way we produce and consume clothes. According to the UN, garment production… accounts for 10 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Plant-based fibres are one way we can address the problem. …Bamboo is being hailed as one of the most sustainable fabrics we can opt for, but is it as eco-friendly as we’re led to believe? Between harvesting and wearing it, the end product isn’t always that natural. …There is some skepticism surrounding how bamboo is grown. In some cases, huge patches of forests, some of which are ancient or endangered, are being cleared to make way for bamboo plantations. This is both destroying habitats and reducing biodiversity, and is the reason most don’t explicitly hail bamboo as a completely clean crop.

Stora Enso has received approval for producing and delivering CLT panels to the U.S. in accordance to the International Building Code (IBS), company announced. The CLT panels can now be produced to be certified in compliance with the North American CLT standard ANSI/APA PRG 320-2019, Standard for Performance-Rated Cross-Laminated Timber.   The changes in the 2021 issue of this code now allow to construct buildings from mass timber of up to 18 storeys, compared with just five before. This clearly paves the way for a new market in mid-rise wooden construction and fossil-based materials such as concrete and steel can be replaced to a much greater extent in North American construction.

Mainstream use of home-grown timber in construction has taken a significant step forward with a new demonstrator project that could give a major boost to Scotland’s economy and the industry’s environmental impact. A consortium of partners … has secured funding from Innovate UK’s Sustainable Innovation Fund to prove the business case for using Scottish timber to create the structural elements of buildings. The project will see the manufacture of the first Scottish-sourced cross laminated timber (CLT) and nail laminated timber (NLT) housing unit – including wall, roof, and floor – using the UK’s only vacuum press at CSIC’s innovation factory in Hamilton. It is hoped it could ultimately lead to the mainstream use of home-grown timber in Scotland and the rest of the UK construction industry, as well as the development of the country’s first engineered timber manufacturing plant. The CLT and NLT superstructure is set to be complete by the end of the year

Putting out the inferno that tore through the roof of Notre Dame in April 2019 was only the beginning of saving the iconic cathedral. From the precarious spaghetti of burnt scaffolding hanging over the building to the potential for the walls to collapse on themselves, architects and conservation experts had — and still have — a daunting task in front of them. A new special from NOVA, the science series on PBS, takes viewers through the challenges. It’s a journey that travels from within the cathedral itself, to the catacombs below Paris, to the forests of Normandy that might provide the wood to reconstruct the building’s massive roof. …NOVA co-executive producer Chris Schmidt… “The exhaustive process of diagnosing the damage and embarking on the restoration of the great cathedral relies on new technologies and medieval craftsmanship alike.” …The special premieres Nov 25, 2020 at 9 p.m. E.T. on PBS and online.

Since an in-person gathering of any reasonable size is increasingly unlikely by the date of next year’s conference (March 30–April 1), the move to virtual helps eliminate any uncertainty and allows us to produce the safest, most cost-effective, and most productive event possible. Even though we would have loved to connect with you in-person, we could not be more excited about the opportunities that a virtual platform brings to the conference. Do know: we plan to produce a hybrid conference in 2022, so an in-person event is still very much in our future! We’re investing heavily to make the 2021 virtual conference a pivotal investment for your company and an industry-defining event (we truly mean that). This won’t be just another Zoom meeting.

A new hotel sitting atop six storeys of commercial office space in Melbourne’s CBD may not look that different from the neighbouring glass-encased development, but is in fact hailed one of the largest timber projects in the world. The 10-storey 14,000sqm commercial tower built out of cross laminated timber sourced entirely from Forest Stewardship Council certified suppliers was completed in August, with only a few COVID-19 hiccups. …The steel and concrete structure was designed to withstand six new concrete levels, but further investigation unveiled 10 levels of timber could be added because it is lighter. …Mr Anderson says there is plenty of untapped potential for timber extensions, which lead to sustainable outcomes. …While materials were shipped thousands of kilometres from Europe for this project, contributing significantly to the carbon footprint, cross laminated timber plant XLam is now operating in Wodonga, NSW. 

Buildings are currently the source of about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Until recently, most of those emissions have come from the energy needed for heating, lighting, and so on. But …as buildings become more energy efficient and the energy system decarbonizes, a greater proportion of a building’s lifetime emissions come from the materials used in constructing it. …Researchers in Finland gathered information on 50 different examples of wooden buildings around the world from previously published studies. They calculated the carbon storage in each building based on amount of wood used in its construction. …researchers say their detailed approach yields a more accurate estimate of the real-world possibilities than past efforts. Not all wooden buildings are created equal, the researchers found. Just because something is called a “wooden building” doesn’t mean it stores a lot of carbon. 

Danielle Doggett

In a small, rustic shipyard on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, a small team is building what they say will be the world’s largest ocean-going clean cargo ship.  Ceiba is the first vessel built by Sail Cargo, a company trying to prove that zero-carbon shipping is possible, and commercially viable. Made largely of timber, Ceiba combines both very old and very new technology: sailing masts stand alongside solar panels, a uniquely designed electric engine and batteries. Once on the water, she will be capable of crossing oceans entirely without the use of fossil fuels.  “The thing that sets Ceiba apart is the fact that she’ll have one of the largest marine electric engines of her kind in the world,” Danielle Doggett, managing director and cofounder of Sail Cargo, tells me as we shelter from the hot sun below her treehouse office at the shipyard. 

While still trailing far behind concrete and steel as the structural material of choice, mass timber frames in the U.S. are on an upswing, in great part because the sustainable material is renewable. There are 445 engineered wood projects completed or under construction, and 534 in design, according to WoodWorks, a nonprofit technical support group promoting the use of wood… And the number of new mass-timber buildings in North America will double every two years, predicts the Forest Business Network. “North America is in the early stages of a mass-timber construction boom, driven by increasing demand and expanded building code acceptance of larger mass-timber structures,” says Robert Malczyk, director of mass timber engineering at Katerra, a supplier and fabricator of cross-laminated timber (CLT).  “We’ve seen adoption of mass timber across a range of building types, market sectors and [locations] particularly in academic, institutional and multifamily sectors.” The U.K. market is more mature.

The world’s second-biggest producer of Indian sandalwood has completed its largest ever commercial harvest in Western Australia’s remote Kimberley region. More than 106 hectares of timber has been put through Santanol’s processing shed in Kununurra, where the sweet scent of sandalwood wafts through the air as it is dried, graded, and fed through grinding equipment. …Santanol managing director David Brocklehurst said after many years spent trying to perfect its forestry model, this was the company’s most important harvest yet. …The Indian sandalwood producer, which was bought by global forestry giant Mercer International in 2018, owns more than 2,000ha of trees across the Ord Irrigation Scheme. …Often described as “liquid gold”, nearly half of all perfumes contain sandalwood oil. …”We can only hope that COVID-19 goes away, because the fine fragrance industry has been severely impacted by lack of travel around the world,” Santanol managing director David Brocklehurst said.