Inside America's mass timber movement
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- Опубліковано 26 кві 2024
- Mass timber is a type of wood being used to build large buildings, like high-rises and airports. Jeff Glor traveled to Oregon to understand more about the material, its safety, and whether it's sustainable to use long-term.
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I don't like cutting down large patches of trees, either. But I'll be hard-pressed if you're trying to tell me that making buildings out of trees is somehow worse for the environment than steel and concrete. Steel and concrete involve a lot of energy and resources to produce. Timber... that literally grows on trees and requires a lot less effort to prepare.
It is such a relief to know that there a still people out there making beautiful things.
Those are not clearcuts, those are cut blocks. Timber is 100% renewable and sustainable, while steel is not and concrete is INCREDIBLY water-intensive.
I live in the building in Milwaukee. Love it. The wood adds so much warmth and character to our unit
Architecture student here! I’m wrapping up my 4th year now, took a class entirely dedicated to mass timber and have used mass timber on almost half of my school projects. This comment section is fantastic, I love that this isn’t being politicized and that you all have done your homework. The class I took allowed me to see this stuff through every phase of its production. We visited a sustainable forest (where the workers are passionate and competent about ecological conservation), a sawmill where the dimensional lumber is cut and dried, and a mass timber production plant, and finally multiple mass timber buildings that are either completed or under construction on my campus (University of Arkansas). This stuff is really only at its infancy, the next new decades will take it to incredible places. I was surprised that the video didn’t touch on carbon sequestration much; essentially, mass timber buildings are giant carbon storage vessels. As long as the wood is being used, the carbon it stores is withheld from release back into the atmosphere. This is incredibly effective in mitigating the emissions that construction causes. They also didn’t talk about how engineered mass timber really is, it’s kind of insane. Each piece is scanned at the plant and 2x’s are connected long ways by finger joints, glued together. The length of each piece of lumber is analyzed to create the strongest glulam beam or clt slab possible, and tests are routinely ran to ensure strength. Moisture is also heavily considered, and lumber with similar MC (moisture content) is paired together to account for compression and expansion. I’ll stop my rambling now, but mass timber is really a fantastic building material that I’m excited to see further integrated into our built environment.
I’ve been a wildland firefighter for many years. Some years take me to Oregon, Washington and Northern California. The amount of trees lost to old age and or the environment needs to be witnessed. Selective cutting is a great way to save forest. Idaho and Montana also have some great forest. Working closely with the US Forest Service we enter some extremely protective areas where we cannot start any type of motor (chainsaw). This country could diversify more in the building materials used.
There are no other building materials that are as carbon negative as timber. The fact that we lack an industry willing to harvest in a sustainable manner is a separate issue that must be solved, but what problem does CLT end? Concrete. It ends dependence on all-concrete and steel structures, which are incredibly carbon intensive. There are simply no better alternatives for being carbon-negative, and the idea that we need to iron out the timber industries' notably lax adherence to regulation, as well as tightening and revising current regulations, shouldn't be a show-stopper, but an obvious first step.
Hope its not like the wood i bought from home depot. Straight today, curly fry tomorrow.
Calling those areas clear cuts is such dishonest propaganda, not to mention the selective avoidance of discussing carbon sequestration. Having spent a good portion of my life in them, the PNW forests are incredibly well maintained and have been managed effectively for decades now. It’s much harder to do the Nordic type selective cutting in the PNW due to the tree sizes and slopes.
Trees are the most renewable resource on the planet. Traps carbon and they grow back.
I'm a logger. Trees are farmed these days and managed very well. We should use more of the tree. We leave all kinds of materials in the woods as a by product. We could easily grind the scraps and make pellets to use in the coal fired electrical plants. We need more forward thinking people running our country and less of the rich cronies who only care about themselves and their friends. Lining pockets at the expense of natural resources and the American public.
I’m an architectural student and I had a hard time believing that would was better for the environment, but after trying my best to disprove it I wound up accidentally proving that they were right. I think so much of it is that we have to look at it not just from seedling to finish product but the entire cycle of when we demolition these buildings, concrete and steel buildings are relatively useless after their demolition the concrete can’t be reused it just becomes more that has to be dealt with and steel is difficult to reclaim. Meanwhile is a recyclable product. We can use it as biomass we can turn it into paper we can do all number of things with the cellulose after it serves its purpose as a structure. Also the fact that we cut down the forest but we replant it, we keep the carbon cycle going of using trapped carbon from the atmosphere which is what wood is it is a byproduct of the tree stripping CO2 from the air and then we’re going to lock that away in a structure and replant the forest to continue the cycle.
Wood: lighter than concrete or steel, stronger than steel when dried properly, cheaper to produce than either if farmed correctly and more resistant to collapse than steel in a fire for a longer time period, oddly enough. Once steel hits around 500 F it begins to lose all strength and bends, causing structural integrity to fail. Wood chars on the outside, but takes longer to burn to the point of failure, the charring actually acting as an insulator until it burns off. Besides, wood doesn't melt...
I’m a long time woodworker but when they talked about fire safety I immediately remembered Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019.
I live in the heart of forest plantations. The trees that are here were planted by the loggers and forest managers themselves. It is farming. They clear cut to plant another crop of trees. Yes it doesn’t look good right after it is harvested but in a few years it is a beautiful new forest. It is amazing how fast these pine trees grow. This is not “green washing” or deforestation. What takes our forests and country life away is city growth.
Those softwoods from clear cutting, will be replaced within 20 to 30 years to cut again, if that. It's one of the reasons conifers are used in a lot of construction. They grow fast, have good strength, excellent flexibility, and are a lot easy to cut and mill, as well as lighter to transport, than hardwood. Hardwood on the other hand, is great for high use wear, such as desk, tables, counters, floors, and more. Both have their pros and cons, but to sensationalize clear cutting trees that grow extremely fast, is not the same as clear cutting hundred to thousand year old tress in a hardwood forest, that do not regrow in 20 years. If anything, cutting, regrowing, cutting, regrowing softwoods is a form of carbon capture.
Anyone who spends time in the woods knows that we need to cut more timber today. Having cut areas in the forest makes a wildlife magnet, full of life.
I watched the building in Seattle being built. It was honestly amazing how quickly that building went up. It took about a week for the floors to be installed. I’ve never seen a multi story building go up so quickly.
The piece didn't adress the other "green" aspect of mass timber and that is the carbon sequestered in the wood. Trees take remove carbon dioxide and use it to build mass. By using the timber you're holding onto that sequestred carbon and allowing new trees to grow and take in even more. The building is going to remove that carbon from the cycle for hopefully 60 or 70 years.
The Airport in Cebu Philippines is a beautiful example of a large timber building. It looks amazing.