Category Archives: Wood, Paper & Green Building

It doesn’t take much more than a drive along the Kruger recycling plant in Montreal’s Sud-Ouest to understand how and why the recycled paper sector has become such an important part of Québec’s pulp and paper industry. While hundreds of bales full of scrapped paper and cardboard are stacked high in the yard on one side of the plant located on Notre Dame near the Lachine Canal, pallets loaded with massive rolls of wrapped paper and cardboard are moving through the dock on the other side of the plant where they’re being sent out to printing and packaging plants throughout both the city and the rest of the province. As a working part of Québec’s ‘cyclical economy’, the reality is that within a single generation, recycled paper is now being used to make everything from low-grade toilet paper to high-end fashion magazines.

Gabriella Vojtila & Kevin McKinley

The Canadian Wood Council recognized recipients of its 2019 Catherine Lalonde Memorial Scholarships. Established 14 years ago, the scholarships are awarded to graduate students in engineering, architecture, wood science and forestry programs who demonstrate a passion for innovation in the industry. They honour the memory of Lalonde, a professional engineer and past president of CWC who championed the use of wood before succumbing to cancer. The first recipient to be honoured at last week’s conference was Gabriella Vojtila, a second-year master candidate in applied science and civil engineering at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. …Other recipients include Md Abdul Hamid Mirdad, a third-year PhD candidate in civil engineering at the University of Alberta in Edmonton… and the team of Shawn Dylan Johnston and Siqi Wang, master of architecture students at the University of Toronto.

The Canadian Wood Council’s Ontario Wood WORKS! Program joined forces with the Ontario Forest Industries Association (OFIA) on February 26 in Toronto to recognize six winning projects as part of the Ontario Wood Design Awards program. Organized to showcase advancements in wood research and technology, as well as the application of wood in construction, one of the six winning projects was the Kenora Airport new terminal building, designed by Architecture49. The 10,915-square-foot Kenora Terminal Building, which officially opened in fall 2018, won in the category of Low-rise Commercial. In describing the award-winning building, OFIA explains its structural frame includes a number of timber posts, glulam beam and Laminated Strand Lumber (LSL) wood joist first floor over a partial basement, and exterior glulam canopies with stone clad columns, both airside and groundside. The project planners sourced local wood for key structural elements, while its roof and floor joists were manufactured in Kenora.

A five-storey wood building in Liberty Village is the first among several timber-based projects planned or on the go in Toronto to be completed.  Construction on the outside of the $60-million project at 80 Atlantic Ave., near King Street West and Dufferin Avenue, is done and interior finishes are expected to be complete in time for occupancy this summer for commercial and retail tenants.  The Star was recently granted a tour of 80 Atlantic, a 90,000-square-foot building that is fully leased to three tenants including Universal Music.  While the ground floor, parking garage and elevator core at 80 Atlantic are made of concrete, the second floor upward is primarily wood — wood ceilings, beams and support columns. The floors and roof panels are made of nail-laminated timber, while the columns and beams are made of glulam, a process by which lumber is bonded together with a water-resistant adhesive.

On Feb. 26, during the Ontario Forest Industries Association’s (OFIA’s) 77^th annual meeting and conference in downtown Toronto, the Canadian Wood Council’s (CWC’s) Wood WORKS! Program recognized the winners of the Ontario Wood Design Awards. “We’re happy to partner with OFIA this year to recognize design and construction teams that are pushing the boundaries for wood construction,” said Marianne Berube, the program’s executive director. Six awards were presented to celebrate the use of wood as a building material in projects that have demonstrated excellence, creativity and innovation across the province. …“These design and construction teams are revolutionizing the way we think about wood in construction,” said Jamie Lim, OFIA’s president and CEO.

Toronto made headlines back in 2009 when the City adopted a bylaw requiring the inclusion of green roofs. …Other cities — Denver, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon — have followed suit. …Regulations notwithstanding, green roofs offer compelling, passive solutions to several environmental concerns. The insulation provided by the soil delivers year-round energy savings and interior noise reduction. The vegetation absorbs carbon dioxides in the atmosphere while offering wildlife biodiversity and habitat. On the other hand, buildings owners in some jurisdictions are hesitant due to concerns over the higher costs for installation and maintenance associated with green roofs. …There’s another matter… the growing popularity of mass timber construction pits the City against Ontario Building Code requirements for non-combustible rooftops that protect roof decks from fire exposure. Green roof vegetation is, after all, flammable.

Dialog, EllisDon, and Smoke Architecture have won a competition to design Centennial College’s A Block Expansion Building in Toronto. The structure could be the first net-zero carbon, mass timber, higher-education facility in Canada when complete in 2023. It also seeks to embody the college’s commitment to truth and reconciliation. Dialog and Smoke approached the project using the Mi’kmaq concept of ‘Two-eyed Seeing’—viewing the world through both an Indigenous and a Western lens—and were inspired by the Anishinabek ‘Seven Fires’ prophecy that says we need to pick up things ‘left by the trail.’ …The design team embraced Indigenous approaches to living in harmony with nature. This approach augmented Western notions and methodologies of sustainability and pushed them to explore ideas beyond Zero-carbon Building certification and the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.

ONTARIO — “It’s good to be Alberta-bound.” – Gordon Lightfoot. I couldn’t help but think of this as a province better known for its oil industry than its forestry sector will permit wood towers up to 12 storeys, doubling the previous building code height limit. Here, we’re still stuck on six. …This despite the fact that MPP Vic Fedeli tabled Bill 19 in March 2018 that would allow mass-timber buildings up to 14 storeys. It’s still under consideration. …It has taken a few years for Ontario builder/developers to plan and build six-storey light wood-frame buildings, and once again, the country’s economic engine (so we tell ourselves) can’t keep up with other Canadian jurisdictions when it comes to engineered mass timber. …There are many mass-timber projects in Canada and Europe going higher than six. …Right now, the focus for Ontario is to go from six to 14.

Ontario should immediately take steps to harmonize the province’s building code with the national system so that wood can be used in more mid-rise and taller residential buildings. That’s the opinion laid out in a letter sent recently by Richard Lyall, president of the Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON), to staff at the provincial Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry. “RESCON believes that harmonizing the Ontario Building Code with the National Building Code (NBC) should be an urgent priority as Ontario is already well behind many other jurisdictions,” he wrote in the three-page letter. “To ensure the successful and prompt harmonization of the Ontario Building code with the National Building Code it is imperative that government and industry work together.” The next edition of the NBC, expected to be published at the end of the year, will allow the use of tall wood construction with fire-resistant material for up to 12 storeys.

MONTREAL – FPInnovations, a non-profit specializing in creating solutions that support the global competitiveness of the Canadian forest sector, and its government and industry partners, today launched the all-new 2019 2nd edition of the building-construction game-changing, “Canadian CLT Handbook.”  Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is increasingly used in the sustainable construction of tall buildings and has a firm footing in the mass-timber-building global movement. FPInnovations and its partners are leading the knowledge transfer of the most up-to-date CLT technical information to the design and construction community.   The two-volume Handbook was funded by the B.C. government’s Forestry Innovation Investment (FII) agency; the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, Natural Resources Canada, Structurlam, Nordic Structures, the Québec Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks; the Province of Alberta, and the Centre for Research and Innovation in the Bio-Economy (CRIBE).

It’s good to be Alberta-bound.” – Gordon Lightfoot.  I couldn’t help but think of this 1972 ditty by the Canadian icon when I heard the recent news that a province better known for its oil industry than its forestry sector will permit wood towers up to 12 storeys, doubling the previous building code height limit.  Here, we’re still stuck on six in The Six (and the rest of Ontario). This despite the fact that MPP Vic Fedeli tabled Bill 19 in March 2018 that would allow mass-timber buildings up to 14 storeys. It’s still under consideration.  Back to Alberta: this prairie province has made this very shrewd move ahead of the National Building Code, which will likely adopt a similar change within the next year. The reasons it cited to make the move now included supporting the forestry industry, improving housing affordability, boosting employment and helping the development industry.

Dr. Martin Fairbank

Resolute Forest Products recently announced a $27 million investment to build a 21 tonne per day cellulose filaments plant at its Kénogami paper mill, to start up in 2021. Many readers probably don’t know what a cellulose filament is, so I thought I’d tell the story of how this nanocellulose product was developed from a lab experiment around 2008 at FPInnovations in Pointe Claire, Quebec. The properties of this product can be better understood using a little physics, chemistry, and math, as well as familiarity with the nature of string cheese! Wood is composed of cellulose fibers, which for the purposes of the little math problem to be discussed in a few moments, we’ll consider as cylinders with diameter d and length h. The kraft pulping process removes the lignin-based “glue” holding the fibers together in a tree, isolating these fibers which, in a typical softwood fiber, have dimensions d = 40 µm and h = 3 mm.